http://www.smh.com.au/national/peoplesmuggling-laws-harsh-on-poor-fishermen-20100404-rls5.html
People-smuggling laws harsh on poor fishermen LINDSAY MURDOCH IN DARWIN April 5, 2010 FEDERAL authorities are routinely charging impoverished Indonesian crewmen who steer boats to Australia for people smugglers with offences that carry mandatory jail terms of up to 20 years. In what lawyers say is an injustice, more than 150 crewmen face charges that carry penalties as harsh as for murder. The men are recruited by organisers reaping millions of dollars for arranging asylum seeker boats. None of the main organisers of 102 boats that have arrived in Australia since 2008 has been brought to justice. They have developed tactics to avoid capture in Australia, including using a second, usually smaller and faster, boat to return them to Indonesia, where people-smuggling laws do not exist. The Indonesian crewmen are usually paid the equivalent of a few hundred dollars in rupiah for steering a boat into Australian waters. They are told Australian authorities will take care of them - even paying them for each day they are detained - before quickly flying them back to Indonesia. The con is easily sold because for years that was the way Australian authorities treated the crew of illegal Indonesian fishing boats. Lawyers say Indonesian crewmen are shocked to learn judges have no option under harsh federal people-smuggling laws but to send them to jail for years. Suzan Cox, director of the Northern Territory Legal Aid Commission, told the Herald most of the people facing people-smuggling offences and mandatory jail terms were not the organisers of the boats. "They are poor fishermen with limited education who come from impoverished backgrounds," she said, and mandatory sentencing made no allowance for the degree of involvement in a crime. A spokesman for the Home Affairs Minister, Brendan O'Connor, said that the crew of boats carrying what he called "irregular maritime arrivals" were generally charged with people-smuggling offences under the Migration Act. "This is because their conduct on the vessel facilitates the entry of non-citizens in contravention of the Migration Act," he said. People convicted over a boat carrying five or more people face a maximum of 20 years' imprisonment, a fine of $220,000 or both. The minium sentence for first-time offenders is a five-year jail term with a three-year non-parole period. Most crewmen have been transferred to detention centres in Australia to await court appearances. Sentencing two Indonesian crewmen who were on SIEV36, the boat that exploded near Ashmore Reef last year, killing five people, the Northern Territory Supreme Court judge, Dean Mildren, said they did not deserve five years' jail. "But for the mandatory minimum sentences I am required to impose, I would have imposed a much lesser sentence than I am now required to do by law," Justice Mildren said.
