Audio excerpt – Child:

“Hello?”

Audio excerpt – Mark Isaacs:

“Hello. Is Ali there?”

Audio excerpt – Ali Jafari:

“Hello.”

Audio excerpt – Mark Isaacs:

“Hello, is that Ali?”

Audio excerpt – Ali Jafari:

“Yes, it’s me.”

MARK:

So Ali is this lovely, gentle kind of natured man.

Audio excerpt – Ali Jafari:

“How are you today?”

Audio excerpt – Mark Isaacs:

“I am very good. How are you, my friend?”

Audio excerpt – Ali Jafari:

“Oh, not too bad, not too bad. Just pass the life.”

MARK:

So Ali Jafari was an Afghan refugee who fled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 1999. He was 26 years old when he left and he left behind his wife and three sons, flew to Indonesia and then boarded a smuggler vessel to Australia, where he intended to seek asylum.

Audio excerpt – Ali Jafari:

“And after that, they give me a protection visa for three years.”

MARK:

He then sponsored his family to join him in Australia and they were overjoyed to be reunited in Australia in 2010, and so that had been 11 years apart.

Shortly after that, Ali's wife gave birth to their fourth son and so things were going really well for them. Or so they thought.

Audio excerpt – Ali Jafari:

It's a very hard life. It's very hard life. What can I say to you, sir, so far away? What can I do?

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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

When Ali Jafari’s permanent resident visa was suddenly cancelled 12 years ago, he was stuck in Pakistan, separated from his family here in Australia.

In the decade since, Ali’s family have been fighting allegations from ASIO that he’s a people smuggler – which he denies.

But they have been up against a goliath national security apparatus, one shrouded in secrecy, where suspected people smugglers are treated as a similar threat to terrorists.

Today, journalist Mark Isaacs on Ali’s family’s search for answers – and why ASIO refuses to provide them.

It’s Thursday, May 8.

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RUBY:

So Mark, welcome to 7am. Thank you for coming on the show.

MARK:

Thanks for having me.

RUBY:

You're here to talk about the case of Ali Jafari. who came to Australia, and was later joined by his family who all settled here, but then had his visa cancelled. So, tell me what happened.

MARK:

So after a few months in immigration detention, he was given temporary temporary protection visa and then later, permanent residency. And he opened a grocery store in Western Sydney with his friend, Sayed Akbar Jafari.

Audio excerpt – Ali Jafari:

“I receive call from someone. They say I'm from Department of Immigration.”

MARK:

Ali had applied for an Australian citizenship, so the Department of Immigration invited him to attend an interview for that citizenship.

Audio excerpt – Ali Jafari:

“I say, from where? They say from the Department of Immigration. When I go there I see the ASIO police.”

MARK:

But when he arrived at the offices of the Department of Immigrations, it turned out to be a surprise interrogation by two plain clothed ASIO officers.

RUBY:

So, what did ASIO allege that Ali had done?

MARK:

So his friend Sayed Jafari, who I mentioned before, their business relationship, that relationship between Ali and Sayed became the centre of an ASIO investigation into suspected people smuggling activities. ASIO suspected Ali had been a part of this people smuggling syndicate that was based in Indonesia. So, the allegation is, he would refer a person who wants to use the smuggling syndicate, so they probably want to try and get family members out of danger in Pakistan, and the allegation is that he would take a cut from those referrals. That's the extent of what we know. We haven’t seen any of the evidence to support that.

RUBY:

Right. What do we know about that interrogation? What was said?

MARK:

So they immediately identify themselves to Ali, and they're clear that the purpose of the interview was for a security assessment, which they said was part of the citizenship process. And over the course of that two hour interview, they asked more than a thousand questions, the court documents say. There was no lawyer present to represent Ali and at no point the ASIO officers advised him to obtain legal representation. Ali wasn't literate in English but he did speak English. There was an interpreter present but having read the ASIO transcript of the interview, he didn't rely on the interpreter. And so he claims that he didn't know what ASIO was at the time and didn't understand the seriousness of the situation.

Audio excerpt – Ali Jafari:

“They say no you have to talk to me, you have to, something like that. I don’t know, I don’t know, please. I don’t know about it.”

MARK:

And you can imagine he's been in the country for, you know, 10 years just working in a shop. I'm sure he wouldn't have understood exactly what was going on in that scenario.

Audio excerpt – Ali Jafari:

“They bullshitting to me, you know.”

MARK:

At the end of the interview. Ali asked the officers if the interview was legal and they admitted that using the disguise of a, in brackets, citizenship interview, could be quite misleading, but this was, quote, regular practice. So after the interview, it was the following year while Ali was abroad in Pakistan, he was visiting his mother, the Director General of ASIO issued him with an adverse security assessment, which says they suspect that he's a threat to national security due to his suspected people smuggling activities. And based on that assessment, the minister then cancelled his visa and that was minister Brendan O'Connor. And Ali’s been been in Pakistan ever since.

RUBY:

And what about Ali's family?

MARK:

Yeah, I mean, Ali's family were left behind. Ali's wife had a breakdown and she struggled to cope with his being away and so it was left to his son, Sayeed, to kind of support the family. He was finishing his high school certificate, he was working part-time, the family relied on his income to survive. But it was also up to Ali's son, Sayeed, to kind of work out what had happened to him and how they could challenge that legally.

So he'd been in the country for three years at that point in time. He was a 17-year-old Afghan kid who'd lived in Pakistan the last, you know, years as an undocumented refugee and all of this burden was put upon him, which is quite incredible.

So they’re a bit confused, they don’t understand what happened, even now, 12 years later. They’re still uncertain what happened to him, why it happened to him and how they can get some kind of resolution to their story.

RUBY:

After the break – Ali’s son’s fight to get their father home.

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RUBY:

So Mark, talk to me a bit more about the legal process after Ali’s visa was cancelled by the immigration minister.

MARK:

So the first thing I would say is that the way they were notified of the visa cancellation was the family received a letter in the mail and they were then expected to call Ali to tell him what had happened. And they had to tell him that he would be refused immigration clearance and removed from the country if he tried to come back to Australia. Ali hired a solicitor, Jeremy Sita, and he applied for a merits review of Ali's security assessment. It took two years before court proceedings were finalised. Ali tried to provide evidence from Pakistan, which was a challenging process. He had to travel from Quetta to Islamabad and, you know, it’s quite risky because he's an undocumented person in Pakistan and he risked being deported if he was caught. He has no identity documents in Pakistan. So if he wants to get his identity documents he'd have to go back to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to get them. So he was kind of stuck in Pakistan there. They went through this court case. When they arrived in court, the family discovered that the evidence behind the security assessment was deemed confidential and would only be revealed in a closed hearing. And that would be without the presence of Ali's family or the legal team. They previously tried to make two Freedom of Information requests for documents relating to Ali's case, but both were rejected. And they were supplied with an unclassified, what they term a statement of grounds, which alleged that Ali was a prominent member of the Sayed Abbas Maritime people smuggling syndicate.

RUBY:

Right. So the evidence that ASIO used to support its case - that Ali Jafari was involved in people smuggling - that evidence, Ali has never seen it and his legal team has never seen it.

MARK:

Yeah, yeah. And so interestingly, when the tribunal made their decision, they acknowledged that there wasn't enough of a case in the, kind of, open evidence, which means the evidence that Ali's legal team were able to see and that the thrust of the argument made by ASIO's council, was in the section that was confidential.

RUBY:

I mean, it seems pretty unusual and also unfair to have evidence used against you that you can't contest because you can't see it.

MARK:

Yeah, certainly. I mean, it goes against the foundational concepts of justice that you're innocent until proven guilty and that you get a fair trial.

RUBY:

Yeah, so to be clear, Ali has actually not been convicted of people smuggling.

MARK:

No, he's never been convicted of people smuggling and ASIO's job isn't to convict people of smuggling. But Australian law has made the offence of people smuggling into one of the most serious criminal offences.

Audio excerpt – Reporter:

“The government will introduce new bills into parliament today to beef up ASIO’s powers, allowing it now to go after people smuggling syndicates and criminals.”

MARK:

The Labor government, in 2010, gave ASIO the power to investigate suspected smugglers, provide security assessments and then, based on those security assessments, they can cancel their visas, they can be placed in immigration detention or deported without criminal trial.

Audio excerpt – Reporter:

“The law enforcement response of this government is more substantial than any other peacetime government, in terms of border protection. More boats on the water, more planes in the air, stronger law enforcement powers, as well as working increasingly cooperatively with our neighbours.”

MARK:

And so that allows the Australian government to avoid having to go through the expensive and often difficult process of charging someone with a criminal offence. And in Ali's case the cancellation of his visa while he was abroad in Pakistan - which is quite a unique case, one that I hadn't come across other than Ali - that allowed them to avoid keeping him in immigration detention indefinitely. So it was a far cheaper, far less difficult process for the Australian government to handle but the consequence was his family were left behind without a father.

RUBY:

So Ali is in Pakistan still. How is he doing?

MARK:

I mean, he is despondent about the future. There's very few legal avenues open for him to try and get back to Australia. He would have to essentially rely on a change of security assessment from ASIO and then, from there, be able to apply for another visa to Australia and the chances of that happening seem to be quite low. He’s been away from his family for almost 12 years now. He's unable to work due to his not being a citizen of Pakistan. And he's fearful of being targeted by extremist groups, of being arrested, of being deported to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, which is increasingly happening in Pakistan at the moment to Afghan refugees. And so he survives on the money that his children send home to him.

Audio excerpt – Ali Jafari:

“It's very hard life, sir, you know? Very hard life. There is very danger in Pakistan, too.”

MARK:

And since then, his children have been quite prominent Australians, one of them is a professional boxer and another, Sayed Agar, was involved in community welfare programs helping refugees and asylum seekers settle in the community through sports and other programs.

Audio excerpt – Ali Jafari:

“I call my son, my wife, all my family upset. It's a very hard life for me ahead.”

MARK:

Yeah, Sayeed and his family, they miss their dad a lot. Sayeed doesn't like to talk about him at home because it upsets his mum. And he wants to be strong for his mum and his brothers, but he remains determined for justice. And so he wants people to know how unfair this has been, but he's also seeking a way to get his father back to Australia. And I don't know if that will be possible.

RUBY:

Mark, thank you so much for your time.

MARK:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Greens leader Adam Bandt is projected to lose his seat of Melbourne to Labor’s Sarah Witty, after a tight count that stretched several days. It marks the second political leader to be ousted at the election.

Meanwhile, Independent Zoe Daniel has also lost her seat of Goldstein to Liberal Tim Wilson, and in Kooyong in Melbourne's inner-east, independent incumbent Monique Ryan has a slim edge over Liberal Amelia Hamer.

And,

India has launched multiple missile strikes inside Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, in what Pakistani authorities have called a blatant act of war.

Pakistani military officials say at least 26 people were killed and 35 others were wounded. It follows weeks of tension after a terrorist attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir killed 26 Hindu tourists.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. Thanks for listening.

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