Applicant A & anor v Minister for Immigration & Ethnic Affairs & anor
(1997) 190 CLR 225(Judgment by: Dawson J)
APPLICANT A & ANOTHER v MINISTER FOR IMMIGRATION & ETHNIC AFFAIRS & ANOTHER
Court:
Judges:
Brennan CJ
DawsonMcHugh
Gummow
Kirby
Subject References:
IMMIGRATION
Refugee status
Fear of persecution by forcible sterilisation pursuant to China's "One Child Policy"
Whether persecution feared "for reasons of ... membership of a particular social group"
Whether legitimate to define particular social group by reference to fear of persecution.
STATUTES
Interpretation
Statute incorporating provisions of international treaty
Approach to construction.
Legislative References:
Migration Act 1958 (Cth) - ss 4(1); ss 22AA; ss 54B
Migration (1993) Regulations (Cth) - reg 2A.5
Other References:
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, Art 1
Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Arts 31, 32
Judgment date: 24 FEBRUARY 1997
Judgment by:
Dawson J
The appellants are Chinese nationals who seek asylum in Australia as refugees. They were married in China and lived in a village near Guangzhou. On 5 December 1993 they arrived in Australia by boat and the wife gave birth to a son, their first and only child, shortly thereafter. They were detained upon arrival under s 54B of the Migration Act 1958 (Cth) ("the Act") as persons reasonably supposed to have been illegal entrants and were refused entry permits. On 14 December 1993, they lodged applications with the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs for recognition as refugees pursuant to s 22AA of the Act. Those applications were deemed, by reg 2A.5 of the Migration (1993) Regulations (Cth), also to be applications in each case for a Domestic Protection (Temporary) Visa (before entry) and a Domestic Protection (Temporary) Entry Permit (before entry).
The applications were refused by a delegate of the Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs on 31 January 1994. The appellants applied to the Refugee Review Tribunal ("the RRT") for review of that refusal pursuant to s 166B of the Act. The RRT reversed the Minister's decision and held that the appellants were refugees. That conclusion was held by Sackville J on appeal to disclose no error of law. However, his Honour's decision was unanimously reversed on an appeal to the Full Federal Court. The appellants now appeal by special leave to this Court.
The term "refugee" is defined in s 4(1) of the Act as having the same meaning as it has in Art 1 of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees done at Geneva on 28 July 1951 ("the Convention"), as amended by the Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees done at New York on 31 January 1967. Article 1A(2) of the Convention in its amended form relevantly defines the term "refugee" as:
"any person who ... owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country".
The words "race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion" are generally referred to as "Convention reasons".
The appellants claim that if they are returned to China they face forcible sterilisation pursuant to China's "One Child Policy" under which the Chinese government permits Chinese families to have only one child. The appellants claim, and the respondents do not dispute, that forcible sterilisation is persecution and that they have a well- founded fear of being forcibly sterilised if returned to China. The dispute between the parties is whether the appellants fear persecution "for reasons of ... membership of a particular social group". Before the RRT, the particular social group of which both appellants were found to be members was ultimately identified as follows:
"'those who having only one child do not accept the limitations placed on them or who are coerced or forced into being sterilised' ... The group exists by virtue of government policy and government action and is thereby cognisable. The persecution feared is precisely because the [appellants are] defined into the group by government policy."
As is clear from that passage, it was by reference to the persecution which the appellants fear that the particular social group to which they were said to belong was defined. Whether that approach exhibits error is the question to be decided in this appeal.
Deciding that question involves the construction of a domestic statute which incorporates a definition found in an international treaty. Such a provision, whether it is a definition or otherwise, should ordinarily be construed in accordance with the meaning to be attributed to the treaty provision in international law. By transposing the provision of the treaty, the legislature discloses the prima facie intention that it have the same meaning in the statute as it does in the treaty. Absent a contrary intention, and there is none in this case, such a statutory provision is to be construed according to the method applicable to the construction of the corresponding words in the treaty [F20] .
The general rule of interpretation of treaty provisions appears in Art 31 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties ("the Vienna Convention"), par 1 of which provides:
"A treaty shall be interpreted in good faith in accordance with the ordinary meaning to be given to the terms of the treaty in their context and in the light of its object and purpose."
Under that rule, the starting point must be the text of the treaty. Of course, the text of a treaty is often couched in fairly general terms due to differences in language and legal conceptions among those to whom it is to be addressed and as part of an attempt to reach agreement among diverse nations. Accordingly, technical principles of common law construction are to be disregarded in construing the text. As Lord Wilberforce said in Buchanan & Co v. Babco Ltd [F21] :
"I think that the correct approach is to interpret the English text ... in a normal manner, appropriate for the interpretation of an international convention, unconstrained by technical rules of English law, or by English legal precedent, but on broad principles of general acceptation".
Article 31(1) also allows, indeed requires, recourse to the context, object and purpose of a treaty [F22] . Article 31(2) states that the context includes, inter alia, the text of the treaty including its preamble and annexures. Article 31 plainly precludes the adoption of a literal construction which would defeat the object or purpose of a treaty and be inconsistent with the context in which the words being construed appear. To say as much is, perhaps, to state no more than the accepted canon of construction that an instrument is to be construed as a whole and that words are not to be divorced from their context or construed in a manner that would defeat the character of the instrument [F23] .
The words "for reasons of" require a causal nexus between actual or perceived membership of the particular social group and the well-founded fear of persecution. It is not sufficient that a person be a member of a particular social group and also have a well-founded fear of persecution. The persecution must be feared because of the person's membership or perceived membership of the particular social group. For instance, the appellants in this case are each members of at least one recognised particular social group - a family, consisting of them and their son [F24] - but it is not their membership of that specific family which motivates their prospective persecutors [F25] . The question which arises in this appeal is whether the persecution they fear is by reason of their membership of a particular social group consisting of all such families who face persecution. That is not only a question about causal nexus, but about what constitutes a "particular social group".
As the Federal Court has recognised [F26] , the phrase "particular social group" should be given a broad interpretation to encompass all those who fall fairly within its language and should be construed in light of the context in which it appears. A "group" is a collection of persons. As Lockhart J pointed out in Morato v. Minister for Immigration [F27] , the word "social" is of wide import and may be defined to mean "pertaining, relating, or due to ... society as a natural or ordinary condition of human life". "Social" may also be defined as "capable of being associated or united to others" or "associated, allied, combined" [F28] . The adjoining of "social" to "group" suggests that the collection of persons must be of a social character, that is to say, the collection must be cognisable as a group in society such that its members share something which unites them and sets them apart from society at large. The word "particular" in the definition merely indicates that there must be an identifiable social group such that a group can be pointed to as a particular social group. A particular social group, therefore, is a collection of persons who share a certain characteristic or element which unites them and enables them to be set apart from society at large. That is to say, not only must such persons exhibit some common element [F29] ; the element must unite them, making those who share it a cognisable group within their society.
I can see no reason to confine a particular social group to small groups or to large ones; a family or a group of many millions may each be a particular social group. Nor is there anything which would suggest that the uniting particular must be voluntary. To the extent that Sanchez-Trujillo v. INS [F30] suggests the contrary I do not think it is persuasive. Furthermore, the significance of the element as a uniting factor may be attributed to the group by members of the group or by those outside it or by both.
However, one important limitation which is, I think, obvious is that the characteristic or element which unites the group cannot be a common fear of persecution. There is more than a hint of circularity in the view that a number of persons may be held to fear persecution by reason of membership of a particular social group where what is said to unite those persons into a particular social group is their common fear of persecution. A group thus defined does not have anything in common save fear of persecution, and allowing such a group to constitute a particular social group for the purposes of the Convention "completely reverses the statutory definition of Convention refugee in issue (wherein persecution must be driven by one of the enumerated grounds and not vice versa )" [F31] . That approach would ignore what Burchett J in Ram v. Minister for Immigration [F32] called the "common thread" which links the expressions "persecuted", "for reasons of", and "membership of a particular social group", namely:
"a motivation which is implicit in the very idea of persecution, is expressed in the phrase 'for reasons of', and fastens upon the victim's membership of a particular social group. He is persecuted because he belongs to that group."
Moreover, if a shared fear of persecution were sufficient to constitute a particular social group, it would render at least three of the other four Convention reasons - race, religion and nationality - superfluous. It is one thing to say that the five Convention reasons can overlap; it is quite another to construe one of them in a manner which renders three of the others unnecessary and the fourth - political opinion - almost so. To construe the term "particular social group" in that way would make it an almost all-encompassing safety net [F33] , allowing a persecutory law or practice of general application to constitute those whose actions bring themselves within its terms members of a particular social group. Such a construction would be contrary to the context in which the words "particular social group" appear.
The requirement that the feared persecution be by reason of "membership" of a particular social group was taken by Black CJ (with whom French J agreed) in Morato v. Minister for Immigration [F34] to require that the persecution be on account of "what a person is - a member of a particular social group - rather than upon what a person has done or does". But as Black CJ himself recognised [F35] , that statement should not be taken too far. The distinction between what a person is and what a person does may sometimes be an unreal one. For example, the pursuit of an occupation may equally be regarded as what one is and what one does. At other times, the distinction may be appreciable but not illuminating. For example, the acts of conceiving and bearing a child may be what people do, but the result of those acts - that the persons involved are parents - is quite central to what they are [F36] .
However, I think that Black CJ's remarks were directed more to the situation of a generally applicable law or practice which persecutes persons who merely engage in certain behaviour or place themselves in a particular situation [F37] . For example, a law or practice which persecuted persons who committed a contempt of court or broke traffic laws would not be one that persecuted persons by reason of their membership of a particular social group. Where a persecutory law or practice applies to all members of society it cannot create a particular social group consisting of all those who bring themselves within its terms. Viewed in that way, Black CJ's distinction between what a person is and what a person does is merely another way of expressing the proposition which I have already stated.
In this case, the reason the appellants fear persecution is not that they belong to any group, since there is no evidence that being the parents of one child and not accepting the limitations imposed by government policy is a characteristic which, because it is shared with others, unites a collection of persons and sets them apart from society at large. It is not an accurate response to say that the government itself perceives such persons to be a group and persecutes individuals because they belong to it. Rather, the persecution is carried out in the enforcement of a policy which applies generally. The persecution feared by the appellants is a result of the fact that, by their actions, they have brought themselves within its terms. The only recognisable group to which they can sensibly be said to belong is the group comprising those who fear persecution pursuant to the one child policy. For the reasons I have given, that cannot be regarded as a particular social group for the purposes of the Convention.
In contending for a construction which would see the particular social group category take on the character of a safety net by allowing a persecutory law or practice of general application to define a particular social group consisting of those who by their actions bring themselves within its terms, counsel for the appellants submitted that the persecution of parents with one child by forcible sterilisation involves the infringement of fundamental human rights. Two were identified in written submissions - a right of personal security and a right to have children, or of reproductive control [F38] . The right of personal security is infringed by the intrusion which is involved in the act of forcible sterilisation. The right to have children, or of reproductive control, is destroyed by the consequence of that intrusion, namely, that sterilised persons are unable further to reproduce.
The latter right is said to be based on the "right ... to found a family" as it appears in Art 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ("the Universal Declaration") and Art 23 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ("the ICCPR"). In truth, it involves the contention that that right extends to founding a family of unlimited size, or, in the words of La Forest J in Chan v. Canada (MEI) [F39] , "the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children" [F40] . Whether that accords with the intention of the Universal Declaration and the ICCPR is not clear. Accepting that proposition would mean that a one child policy enforced, for example, only by financial penalties and not by forcible sterilisation would contravene the Universal Declaration and the ICCPR. Governments faced with the dangers of enormous population expansion and limited space and resources may understandably take the view that measures are required to curb or prevent population growth to ensure that basic living standards (not to mention human rights) can be maintained. Indeed, the male appellant himself, in his evidence before the RRT, said that although he strongly objected to the government making the decision for him, he did not object to the limiting of families and believed that two children was a good number.
What the appellants in truth object to is not the one child policy per se , but its enforcement by officials in their area by forcible sterilisation. The right to personal security comes closer to sustaining that objection and appears to have a stronger foundation in international law. Article 3 of the Universal Declaration guarantees the "right to ... security of person". The appellants also refer to Art 5 of the Universal Declaration and Art 7 of the ICCPR, which are directed to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. No doubt forcible sterilisation involves significant bodily intrusion without consent and has important consequences.
For my part, however, I do not see how those considerations assist the appellants, since they merely suggest that the persecution which they fear is serious and may infringe internationally recognised human rights. That is not the issue in this appeal. The issue is whether that persecution is for one of the five Convention reasons. As Beaumont, Hill and Heerey JJ in the Full Court of the Federal Court observed in this case [F41] :
"Since a person must establish well-founded fear of persecution for certain specified reasons in order to be a refugee within the meaning of the Convention, it follows that not all persons at risk of persecution are refugees. And that must be so even if the persecution is harsh and totally repugnant to the fundamental values of our society and the international community. For example, a country might have laws of general application which punish severely, perhaps even with the death penalty, conduct which would not be criminal at all in Australia. The enforcement of such laws would doubtless be persecution, but without more it would not be persecution for one of the reasons stated in the Convention."
They went on to say [F42] :
"The foregoing may seem a truism, but it needs to be kept firmly in mind because some of the reasoning in the authorities does disclose a tendency to argue that the more abhorrent the persecution is, the more likely it is that the targets of that persecution are members of a particular social group."
If I may say so with respect, an example of that kind of reasoning is, it seems to me, to be found in the dissent of La Forest J in Chan v. Canada (MEI ) [F43] . In the earlier decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Canada (Attorney-General) v. Ward [F44] , La Forest J had laid down as one guideline for determining the existence of particular social groups "groups whose members voluntarily associate for reasons so fundamental to their human dignity that they should not be forced to forsake the association". In applying that reasoning in Chan , the majority in the Canadian Federal Court of Appeal had held that there was no "voluntary association" between parents with more than one child who disagree with forced sterilisation, referring to La Forest J's distinction in Ward [F45] between what a person is and what a person merely does [F46] . On appeal in Chan , La Forest J disagreed with the Federal Court of Appeal's application of his reasoning in Ward . His Lordship stated that the guidelines in Ward were not to be considered as definitive tests divorced from the "general underlying themes of the defence of human rights and anti-discrimination" [F47] which had been the basis of his analysis in Ward . That analysis had relied, at least in part, on concepts taken from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Looking at the problem from that perspective, La Forest J in Chan [F48] found it "difficult to conceive that the associative qualities of having children may be considered so sufficiently analogous to the associative qualities of being a member of a taxi-driver co-operative to warrant any meaningful comparison". Accordingly, in his Lordship's view [F49] :
"the question that must be asked is whether the appellant is voluntarily associated with a particular status for reasons so fundamental to his human dignity that he should not be forced to forsake that association. The association or group exists by virtue of a common attempt made by its members to exercise a fundamental human right."
It may be observed that it is the very nature of a human right, especially, one would have thought, a "fundamental" one, that it is common to all humanity. The wish of a number of persons to exercise a right which all persons share and are entitled to exercise at any time can hardly be enough to unite those persons into a particular social group. Something more would be required, and indeed that is why La Forest J's reference to "voluntary association" in Ward made sense as far as it went. A fundamental human right could only constitute a unifying characteristic if persons associated with each other on the basis of the right or, it may be added, if society regarded those persons as a group because of their common wish to exercise the right. And in that situation, it would be the unifying aspect of that element, not its character as a fundamental human right, which allowed it to delineate a particular social group. The only relevance of the characterisation of the common element as a fundamental human right is, perhaps, that it might more readily suggest that, because it is fundamental, persons associated for the purpose of asserting the right are united so as to form a particular social group. If that is the case, then to adopt the language of Black CJ in Morato v. Minister for Immigration [F50] and La Forest J in Ward [F51] , the association might be viewed as going to what one is rather than being what one merely does.
But in the absence of such an association, there is nothing to unite a collection of persons in China who do not accept the limits imposed upon their reproductive freedom and who fear forcible sterilisation in apparent contravention of their right to personal security other than their common fear of persecution. I must confess, with respect, that I do not understand La Forest J's reference in Chan [F52] to the "associative qualities of having children" if one is speaking, as his Lordship appears to be, of disparate couples from all walks of life who do not know each other and may have nothing in common save for the fact that they are parents of one child who do not wish to be forcibly prevented from having more. To say that their behaviour in reproducing and their consequent status as parents have "associative qualities" because the exercise of fundamental human rights is involved is, I think, misleading.
Whether such reasoning has force in Canada, where the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has been seen as relevant, in my view it has no application in Australia and it is not assisted by reliance on the humanitarian character of the Convention. As I have said, Art 31 of the Vienna Convention directs a court to consider the context, object and purpose of treaty provisions, and, indeed, the construction which I have placed on the phrase "particular social group" is influenced by those considerations. But Art 31 does not justify, to adopt the words of the International Law Commission [F53] , "an investigation ab initio into the intentions of the parties" in order to achieve a result which is thought to further those intentions. In any event, it does not appear that reference to the context, object and purpose of the Convention provides a construction which would assist the appellants.
The humanitarian aims of the Convention are apparent from its preamble, the first of which refers to the affirmation by the General Assembly of the United Nations (in the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration) of "the principle that human beings shall enjoy fundamental rights and freedoms without discrimination". The second preamble refers to the manifestation of the United Nations, on various occasions, of "its profound concern for refugees" and to its endeavours to "assure refugees the widest possible exercise of these fundamental rights and freedoms". In the third preamble the parties speak of their intention to "extend the scope of and the protection accorded by" previous international agreements on refugees.
On the other hand, the fourth preamble recognises that "the grant of asylum may place unduly heavy burdens on certain countries" and the need for international cooperation, whilst the fifth preamble implores all States to recognise "the social and humanitarian nature of the problem of refugees" and "do everything within their power to prevent this problem from becoming a cause of tension between States". By including in its operative provisions the requirement that a refugee fear persecution, the Convention limits its humanitarian scope and does not afford universal protection to asylum seekers. No matter how devastating may be epidemic, natural disaster or famine, a person fleeing them is not a refugee within the terms of the Convention. And by incorporating the five Convention reasons the Convention plainly contemplates that there will even be persons fearing persecution who will not be able to gain asylum as refugees.
There are other limitations on the humanitarian scope of the Convention and on the meaning of the term "refugee". However, what I have said is sufficient to illustrate the simple point that despite the reference in the Convention to the concern that persons enjoy the "widest possible exercise of ... fundamental rights and freedoms" [F54] , there are limits on the extent to which the Convention attempts to translate that concern into practical reality. In that respect, the Convention, like many international and municipal instruments, does not necessarily pursue its primary purpose at all costs [F55] . The purpose of an instrument may instead be pursued in a limited way, reflecting the accommodation of differing viewpoints, the desire for limited achievement of objectives, or the constraints imposed by limited resources. No doubt many of those limits in the present context spring from the well-accepted fact that international refugee law was meant to serve as a "substitute" for national protection where the latter was not provided due to discrimination against persons on grounds of their civil and political status [F56] . It would therefore be wrong to depart from the demands of language and context by invoking the humanitarian objectives of the Convention without appreciating the limits which the Convention itself places on the achievement of them.
I should add that the travaux preparatoires and the circumstances of conclusion of the treaty [F57] do not, in my view, shed any real light on the problems raised by this appeal. Certainly, they do not stand in the way of the conclusions I have reached.
Counsel for the appellants before this Court ultimately accepted that the particular social group for which he contended relied, at least in part, upon the fear of persecution by forcible sterilisation. However, he submitted that there were other elements which delineated the particular social group of which the appellants were said to be members. It appears that the persecution feared by the appellants is not practised throughout China generally, being confined to particular rural localities in which over-zealous officials in the area enforce the one child policy by forcible sterilisation. It also appears that the appellants, as members of the Han majority, do not have the same indulgences afforded to them in relation to the number of children they may have as do the members of certain ethnic minorities. Counsel also referred to the fact that the appellants were a couple of reproductive age and that the one child policy applied economic and other sanctions, short of persecution, to persons in that situation.
This Court is handicapped to some extent by the fact that the RRT's findings on some of these issues are not altogether clear. But I am unable to see how all those couples of reproductive age, who have one child, who are not of a certain ethnicity and who live in a particular location are united by the existence of those characteristics rather than by the fact that they all fear persecution. The existence of economic sanctions in the enforcement of the one child policy is certainly not unique to them and does not unite them or set them apart.
In truth, the social group contended for by counsel for the appellants may be described in these words of Beaumont, Hill and Heerey JJ in the court below [F58] :
"X fears persecution by reason of circumstances A, B and C which are applicable to him or her. X is therefore a member of a particular social group constituted by all people to whom circumstances A, B and C are applicable."
As their Honours pointed out, that is an argument which has been rejected by a line of United States cases [F59] . The argument amounts to little more than the assertion of common demographic factors. What the appellants need to demonstrate is that circumstances A, B and C, or any one of them, operate to unite people such that they are an identifiable social group apart from the fact that they all face persecution. They have not done so.
I would therefore hold that the appellants are not refugees within the meaning of s 4(1) of the Act. I would dismiss the appeal.