Kevin Rudd’s suspension of refugee processing is legally contentious and flies in the face of his ambition to have Australia taken seriously on the international stage, a law professor and former diplomat say.

The Prime Minister trumpeted the importance of international law when it was politically advantageous but was quick to flout it under election nerves, the Deakin University professor of law, Mirko Bagaric, said.

“This is probably the most repugnant refugee policy of any Western country that is a party to the international refugee convention. I know of no precedent of anything approaching a Western democracy doing anything as brutal to refugees as this,” Professor Bagaric said.

Mr Rudd is lobbying for an Australian seat on the UN Security Council, has considered a human rights charter and attacked the previous government for failing to sign up to the international Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

“Ostensibly, at least, the Rudd Government really covets and values international law,” Professor Bagaric said.

Last week, the government announced it would stall processing for all asylum seekers from Sri Lankaand Afghanistanfor between three and six months, resting the decision on a pending UNHCR report.

The refugee organisation has since rejected Labor’s claims that other countries had frozen asylum claims from Sri Lanka. People fleeing Sri Lanka and Afghanistanlast year made up 79 per cent of all boat arrivals to Australia.

Over that period, 854 Afghans and 112 Sri Lankans were found by the immigration department to be owed Australia’s protection.

Yesterday, Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith said it was a matter for each country to announce its own refugee processing arrangements.

´´”A number of countries have introduced suspensions for the processing of Sri Lankan asylum seekers,” his spokeswoman said.

The decision to suspend processing was made using security information from government, multilateral agencies and non-governmental sources, she said.

“The bulk of this information is not publicly available,” she said.

A former diplomat posted to Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, Bruce Haigh, said Australia’s freeze was a shield against opposition criticism of the government’s border protection policies.

“Rudd has a glass jaw,” he said. “He has been prepared to trash his quest for the UN Security Council just to make sure he is re-elected. The people in Sri Lankaare saying the assessments the Australian government is making are nonsense.”

Denmarkis also believed to have stopped processing refugees from Sri Lanka.

The Immigration Minister, Chris Evans, said the freeze did not contravene Australia’s international obligations to refugees.

“It doesn’t diminish people’s rights in any way,” his spokeswoman said yesterday. “This is simply a suspension of the processing of their applications.”

Psychiatrist Jon Jureidini, who has worked with refugees for more than a decade, said delays would heighten anxiety among Afghan and Sri Lankan asylum seekers.

“We know that one of the toxic factors for people in detention under the previous regime was the uncertainty about their future,” he said. “Once you build up a core of people who have spent a very long time in detention, that seems to be a particularly dangerous situation.” – (The Age, Australia)