Abbott the Criminal is getting pulled up by surpreme court for his ILLEGAL Activity

PRIME Minister Tony Abbott says High Court action will not stop his government from preventing asylum seeker boats from trying to reach Australia.

The High Court has intervened in the Federal Government’s attempts to hand a boatload of 153 asylum seekers over to the Sri Lankan navy at sea, issuing an injunction to temporarily stop the transfer.

The order was issued about the same time Sri Lankan police said 41 asylum seekers in a second boat, handed over by Australia on Sunday, had been arrested and faced “rigorous imprisonment”.

The High Court will sit in Sydney today to hear an application from refugee advocates seeking to permanently halt the handover.

Human rights lawyer George Newhouse, acting for 48 Tamils on board, said those on the boat were sure to be charged when they returned.

“People die in Sri Lankan jails and people are tortured in Sri Lankan jails and I would have thought an Australian minister would have thought long and hard about sending people to a place where they could die,” he said of Immigration Minister Scott Morrison.

Lawyers will argue the efforts to hand the asylum seekers over to the Sri Lankan navy were illegal.

“In a nutshell, we will be arguing that the men, women and children on that boat are entitled to have their very serious claims for protection heard in accordance with Australian law,” Mr Newhouse said.

Mr Abbott dodged questions about the asylum seeker group and the High Court’s decision, but told Channel 7 the Government’s resolve is clear.

“The Labor Party and its activists and the Greens and their activists will try to disrupt the government’s policies,” Mr Abbott said today.

The exact whereabouts of the boat with the 153 passengers on board is not known, and Mr Morrison has refused to provide any details, citing security provisions associated with the military-style Operation Sovereign Borders.

The boat set sail from southern India about three weeks ago and its passengers have not been heard from since it was intercepted by Australian authorities 250km from Christmas Island about 10 days ago.

Justice Susan Crennan granted the temporary injunction in a late sitting yesterday.

There has been growing unease that the decision to hand the Sri Lankans back to their own navy with minimal screening, as part of the Australian Government’s robust efforts to stop people-smuggling boats rescuing Australian shores, may be compromising our international obligations to those seeking asylum.

It has been more than 200 days since a people-smuggling boat arrived in Australia, under the Government’s electorally popular but hard line policy, which includes turning boats back to their country of origin.

Labor’s immigration spokesman Richard Marles said he had serious concerns about the Government’s secrecy surrounding the two Sri Lankan boats.

“We are also deeply concerned about the integrity of processing people at sea, en masse, and ... how this complies with Australia’s international obligations under relevant conditions.”

Greens’ immigration spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young said there were 37 children involved, whose “lives were in question”.

“This will be a test for the Government and the legality of their actions on the high seas,” she said.

The father of a three-year-old girl named Febrina, who is among 37 children on the second boat, with 153 people on board, has appealed for the government to protect his daughter.

“I am desperate to know where my family is. I can’t function at all not knowing. I know all of them would be in very big trouble if sent back to Sri Lanka,” he told the Tamil Refugee Council through an interpreter.

Mr Grant told news.com.au it is believed that 11 people on board the second boat have been tortured before and will be taken back to their torturers.

“We are sending people already tortured by Sri Lanka, back to them. To send people back to a place where they have been tortured beggars belief.”

“It defies description, that a government that supports democracy is using tactics of a totalitarian regime to achieve a political objective.”

veya_victaous wrote:@ben
we do have a constitution but it is so half arsed  it is not really worth mentioning (and it would be legit under it anyway)  we have no 'bill of rights'

Our Constitution is basically a list that say "we create the Australia Federal Government to look after these things "  with the last point saying Everything else (including schools hospitals police roads) remain the responsibility of the states.

in practical terms it will stop them, the Supreme court can over rule the gov't. And Abbott has a snowball chance in hell of getting retroactive legislation through on this issue (that would make his actions legal)

Appointments are officially made by the Governor-General in Council. In practice, appointees are nominated by the Prime Minister, on advice from the Cabinet, particularly from the Attorney-General of Australia. For example, four Justices were appointed while Andrew Fisher was Prime Minister, but it was largely on Attorney-General Billy Hughes' authority that the candidates were chosen.[citation needed] Since 1979, the Attorney-General has been required to consult with the Attorneys-General of the states and territories of Australia about appointments to the court.[108] The process was first used in relation to the appointment of Justice Wilson, and has been generally successful, despite the occasional criticism that the states merely have a consultative, rather than a determinative, role in the selection process.[109]

There are no qualifications for Justices in the Constitution (other than that they must be under the compulsory retirement age of 70[110]). The High Court of Australia Act 1979 requires that appointees have been a judge of a federal, state or territory court, or that they have been enrolled as a legal practitioner for at least five years with either the High Court itself or with a state or territory Supreme Court. There are no other formal requirements.[111]

The appointment process stands in stark contrast with the highly public selection and confirmation process for justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. While there are people who are critical of the secrecy of the process and who advocate a more public method for appointments, there are relatively few who dispute the quality of appointees.[citation needed] Three Chief Justices (Sir Adrian Knox, Sir John Latham and Sir Garfield Barwick) were conservative politicians at the time of their appointment. However, there is frequent criticism of Barwick's intervention in the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, when he gave advice to Governor-General Sir John Kerr.[citation needed] On the other side of politics, Labor politicians H. V. Evatt, Sir Edward McTiernan and Lionel Murphy were also appointed to the High Court; Murphy's appointment was controversial at the time and his reputation was gravely damaged in 1985 by charges that he had attempted to pervert the course of justice, although he was eventually acquitted