Refugee Action protest in Melbourne
Takver/Flickr

Associate Professor of Law, University of Newcastle

In a high-profile decision of the High Court of Australia last week, Plaintiff M68-2015 v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection [2016] HCA 1 (3 February 2016), a 6-1 majority ruled that the Australian government is entitled to continue its policy of detaining certain asylum seekers off-shore in the Pacific nation of Nauru. In recent days there has been a lot of publicity on this issue, especially in relation to a group of mothers and their babies and young children who have been receiving medical treatment in Australia, and will now have to be returned to the dreadful conditions in Nauru. Today a number of Christian churches went public with an offer of “sanctuary” for those who are supposed to be returned.

From one of the press reports, “Churches become potential flashpoint after offering sanctuary to asylum seekers in wake of High Court verdict” (A Gartrell, Sydney Morning Herald, Feb 4, 2016):

Ten Anglican churches and cathedrals have invoked the ancient Christian tradition to offer protection to the 267 people – including 37 babies – facing imminent transfer to Nauru after the court on Wednesday upheld the legality of the government’s offshore processing regime.

The movement is being led by the Anglican Dean of Brisbane, Dr Peter Catt, who has declared his St John’s Anglican Cathedral a place of sanctuary.

Dr Catt said if any asylum seekers sought sanctuary in his church he would do his best to keep the authorities out. He said he fully accepts that he and other clergy could be charged with obstruction and potentially even face possible jail time.

It seems worthwhile to comment briefly on the legal issues around “sanctuary” in Australia.

Background to the Law of “Sanctuary”

Most people are aware that church buildings in the past were a place of refuge, where some wrongdoers could seek sanctuary from arrest. As a number have noted, this idea no doubt had its roots in the Bible, where in the Old Testament there are some recorded references to people seeking sanctuary at the altar of the Temple (see 1 Kings 1:49-53, Adonijah, and 1 Kings 2:28-34, Joab; one was allowed to avoid punishment and the other, seen as a deliberate murderer, was not). The law of Moses also saw a system of “cities of refuge” (Joshua 20:1-6) where those who had committed what today would be called “involuntary manslaughter” could seek to flee from revenge at the hands of the family of the deceased. (For a careful discussion of these passages, and other material relating to Old Testament views of “asylum”, see Jonathan Burnside, God, Justice and Society (Oxford, 2011) at 265-270.)

In the early days of the common law of England, this was implemented by a system of sanctuary which applied in local churches in different ways. (For an overview of the history of legal sanctuary in Europe and elsewhere see L Rabben, Give Refuge to the Stranger (Left Coast, 2011), ch 3; for an analysis of the issue at common law see J H Baker “The English Law of Sanctuary” (1990) 2/6 Ecclesiastical Law Jnl 8-13.) With the growing power of the secular monarchy, areas where wrongdoers could escape the King’s justice were increasingly reduced, and in 1624 sanctuary as a common law doctrine was abolished by statute (21 Jam I, c 28, s 7).

Any legal operation of the doctrine, then, was well and truly removed from the common law before the European settlement of Australia, and not part of that law which was “received” into our system. In any event, the continuation of a law which gave special recognition to the status of church buildings was unlikely to have survived the process of Federation, where at least for the purposes of the Commonwealth, no “establishment” of religion was possible under s 116 of the Constitution.

Churches and Civil Disobedience

It seems likely, then, that members of a church who shelter someone who is supposed to be returned to Nauru may be guilty of an offence under s 233E of the Migration Act 1958 (Cth), subsection (3) of which provides:

 (3)  A person (the first person ) commits an offence if:

                     (a)  the first person harbours another person (the second person ); and

                     (b)  the second person is an unlawful non-citizen, a removee or a deportee.

Penalty:  Imprisonment for 10 years or 1,000 penalty units, or both.

The relevance of religious freedom

It might be argued, however, that a church determined to provide sanctuary was not necessarily breaking the law, if doing so was necessary to live out the commitments of their religious faith. Section 116 of the Commonwealth Constitution not only forbids the “establishment” of religion, but it also prohibits the Commonwealth Parliament from enacting a law “for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion”. I have discussed the protection of religious freedom on a number of other occasions on this blog previously: see here and herefor material and links to a general overview. But this provision, while it has not been fully explored yet, might offer some protection for conscientious action by churches in this area. (I stress that this blog cannot provide formal “legal advice”, and so of course anyone wanting to act in this area should seek such advice from their own lawyer. But I offer here a possible scenario.)

It seems best to deal with what may be two immediate objections to this suggestion.

One would be to say that religious freedom protects a person’s right to believe, and perhaps their right to go to church, or a mosque, or a synagogue; but cannot over-ride a generally applicable law like the migration law. The short answer is that this is not the way a right to “free exercise of religion” operates. It is generally recognised in international law, and in other countries where religious freedom is protected, that it not only protects the area of belief and worship, but also provides at least some protection for action involved in living out one’s faith. In the main Australian case on the issue so far, Adelaide Company of Jehovah’s Witnesses Inc v Commonwealth (1943) 67 CLR 116, handed down at the height of World War 2 where it was thought that the Jehovah’s Witnesses organisation were undermining the war effort and so should be banned, the High Court of Australia stressed that religious freedom was a key human right recognised by the Constitution, and involved not simply internal belief but also everyday action. As Latham CJ said:

The section refers in express terms to the exercise of religion, and therefore it is intended to protect from the operation of any Commonwealth laws acts which are done in the exercise of religion. Thus the section goes far beyond protecting liberty of opinion. It protects also acts done in pursuance of religious belief as part of religion. (at 124)

now that the High Court in McCloy has set up a careful scheme for balancing the implied freedom of political speech with other important social values, it may well be open to applying the McCloy tests, and in particular the questions of “proportionality”, to consideration of what is, after all, an explicit constitutional freedom in s 116. In fact my colleague Dr David Tomkins, in a helpful overview of the McCloy decision (“Developers, Election Funding and the Implied Freedom of Political Communication: the HCA weighs in” (Dec 2015) Law Society Journal 88-89), has suggested that indeed this is one direction that might be taken in the future. Such a balancing process, which gives weight to the importance of religious freedom and the need to only over-ride it in very limited circumstances, would in my view be a positive development.

Conclusion

It is not known yet whether the offer of the various churches to provide sanctuary will be taken up, and if so the attitude of the Commonwealth Government. It is worth noting that, while there does not seem to have been a strong tradition of this in Australia previously, other countries have experienced the phenomenon and dealt with it in different ways. A very useful article by Canadian Sean Rehaag, “Bordering on Legality: Canadian Church Sanctuary and the Rule of Law” (2009) 26/1 Refuge 43-56 discusses the Canadian experience and some of the issues that subsequently arose. One interesting issue he raises is that, when offering sanctuary became a well-established practice, churches had to develop a “screening process” to decide who, among the many candidates, would be offered sanctuary. In doing so, as he points out, they often replicated the sort of process adopted by the Canadian government in deciding who should be granted refugee status. These sort of issues will need to be considered by Australian churches as well, should it become necessary to proceed in this direction. (For those who are interested, there is a Canadian website at http://sanctuarycanada.ca with a lot of interesting material based on the experience of Canadian churches.)

The churches have been warned, both by legal experts and by the Immigration Minister, that they may face criminal sanctions if they go ahead with their proposals. They may respond that the law recognises their right to free exercise of religion, and that as a result they are not disobeying the law. They may accept that they are in breach of the law but choose to go ahead in obedience to a higher law. Complex issues may arise as to who is to be offered sanctuary, and for how long, and whether this will undermine an overall policy which some see as more humane in the long term. But in any event their willingness to stand up and risk their own comfort and safety for the rights of “little ones” who are loved by their Lord Jesus (see Matthew 19:13-14) seems thoroughly commendable.

Originally posted at https://lawandreligionaustralia.wordpress.com Used with Permission.