The 'Malaysia solution': has its time now come?

Malaysia could not long sustain two different human rights policies, or management regimens, towards two different classes or categories of refugees in their own country.

It could not long support both a more “liberal” regimen for those who, via the Australia-Malaysia agreement, came under appropriate and effective international supervision and protection and, at the same time, a different, far more restrictive and grimly authoritarian policy and regimen for everybody else, all other refugee-status claimants.

Implementation of the “Malaysia solution” would soon put enormous pressure on Malaysia to treat all refugees there in the same, more “enlightened” way, in accordance with the basic requirements of international human rights law and practice.

Beyond that, this liberalising momentum would, in turn, further increase humane pressures on Malaysia to act in general in accordance with international human rights law and practice, not simply in refugee and immigration matters but towards its own citizens, all of them.

A splendid outcome!

Those who are eager to see Malaysia align itself in closer conformity with international human rights principles and standards may have here exactly the instrument that their otherwise impotent rhetoric needs.

This outcome ought to please not only the high-minded supporters of refugee rights in Australia but also those who call for greater liberalism in Malaysia.

That prospect poses a special challenge, which they cannot flee, to those who see Malaysia’s “liberal democratic deficiencies” as the very reason why a “Malaysia solution” for the region’s immigration problem must be rejected.

That outcome, to me, seems a very fine and neat solution all round.

Not perfect, not totally fine and neat, but getting there, heading in that direction.

It is clearly the best, most practicable, course that we might take under the very difficult and always potentially tragic circumstances now obtaining.

Some may object in high-minded horror: “But you are proposing to use these poor refugees as some kind of lever or shoehorn against the Malaysians, and just about everybody else too! You want to use them, and to make use of their plight, instrumentally!”