Section 7 is about the establishment of the Refugee Applications Board. The Minister talked about transparency and, while we will come to the Schedule which details the membership of that board at a later stage, I want to make a preliminary remark on the need to ensure that this board is seen to be independent.
A number of groups and organisations have taken issue with the composition of the board. There are different types of board structure. One can have an individual making the first decision and a tribunal or a board for an appeal, or it can be the other way around. The Minister seems to have adopted the approach of a tribunal of more than one person initially. If this approach is to be adopted the personnel the Minister intends to appoint to this tribunal is entirely wrong. The tribunal should not be made up of an independent lawyer and two civil servants, one from the Department of Justice and one from the Department of Foreign Affairs.
In the context of such a tribunal those Departments should certainly have an input in the sense of bringing their observations to the knowledge of the tribunal on any application. However I urge the Minister to change the personnel in that tribunal. The three people should be entirely independent and should be seen to be so. Simply appointing civil servants from the Department of Justice and the Department of Foreign Affairs will not achieve that. It is the cause of some disappointment that the Minister is suggesting the matter be approached in this way. If we are to have a three person tribunal it should be composed of people who are not civil servants and who are not attached to any Department. It should be entirely independent of Government and the Civil Service.
Even if the Minister says the people appointed will act independently there are great psychological difficulties for officials acting independently of their Departments. One or both Departments may make a case that someone should not be granted refugee status for particular reasons. That case may be wrong and substantial evidence given or representations made may show why. A decision will have to be made at the end of the day and the Minister is asking two civil servants to make an adjudication on an issue in respect of which their colleagues have formed a view. It is entirely the wrong approach.
The Minister means to put a good structure in place but she should reconsider the personnel to be appointed to the tribunal. I emphasise that it should not be composed of officials from the Departments of Justice and Foreign Affairs. They should be three independent people. The chairperson should have legal training but it is not essential that the other two have legal training. What they need is a degree of insight and common sense.
The difficulty is that when a tribunal as envisaged by the Minister reaches decisions in controversial cases with an entirely independent mind and those decisions give rise to public controversy, appearing to be largely following the view of Government Departments, there will be a perception that the tribunal is not operating independently. It is a bad start and I ask the Minister, before we get to the Schedule, to consider proposing amendments with regard to who should be appointed to this tribunal and who should act as the adjudicators in applications for political status.