Family claiming refugee status wins appeal to stay in country

Transcript

A family claiming refugee status because of rising sea levels on their Pacific Island has won an appeal to stay in New Zealand.

It is believed to be the first time climate change has been successfully used in an immigration case.
 
Gill Bonnett has the story.

Sigeo Alesana, a qualified teacher, and his wife are from Tuvalu and came to New Zealand in 2007. The immigration and deportation tribunal heard the family received poor immigration advice and was turned down for several visas before lodging claims for refugee and protected person status in 2012.

Trevor Zohs, who is in their legal team, says the family is happy and relieved to be able to stay here. He says the tribunal accepted that exposure to climate change can be a humanitarian circumstance.

TREVOR ZOHS: The climate change issues the fact that there's a compromise provision of protection available there because of the effects of climate change on the availability of water, the vulnerability of children especially to the sicknesses which can flow from that.

The tribunal says all the factors were taken into account on a cumulative basis, and says the family's deportation would amount to an unusually significant disruption to a dense network of family relationships, including Mr Alesana's mother, who he cares for, and his five sisters and their children.

A senior lecturer in law at Auckland university of Technology, Vernon Rive, says the tribunal was careful in its wording so as not to open the floodgates for aspiring immigrants to make similar claims.

VERNON RIVE: What the tribunal has said is that climate change can be one of the many factual circumstances that can contribute to establishing humanitarian protection in New Zealand and I don't think, although I haven't exhaustively checked the IPT records, I don't think there has been many or any cases where the impacts of climate change have been raised quite so directly in a successful application for residents.

Mr Rive says it may be that in years to come, New Zealand authorities will have to make a decision on what they will do to people leaving countries where environmental and living conditions have deteriorated further.

A 13-year-old girl from Tuvalu is the first known case of an asylum-seeker appealing an immigration decision on climate change grounds. Her bid failed in 2000. Since then a family from Kiribati has also used the argument, its case is still under consideration.

The associate professor of law at Auckland University, Bill Hodge, says it will be interesting to see whether global warming could become a stand-alone reason for allowing people to stay here.

BILL HODGE: It may be that the Kiribati case opened everyone's mind to considering climate change, I mean there's some pretty graphic details of how storm surges have ruined the vegetable gardens and the houses and so on so once you get the courts attention on that ground they may be more willing and that's the way law develops. In this particular case you've got all the family questions but the next case may have fewer family connections and not the same strong New Zealand connection that this Tuvalu case has.

Bill Hodge says the United Nations conference in Samoa in September will include discussions on the implications of climate change to Pacific Islands.