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Visa watch-list for criminals entering Australia
Published on: Mon, 09 Jan 2006 11:04:47 GMT
POTENTIAL terrorists and criminals entering Australia will face heightened scrutiny, under a new watch-list to be set up this year. The Department of Immigration and Federal Government security agencies are setting up a control centre to administer the Movement Alert List, which places a red flag next to the names of criminals, people with terrorist connections, and other undesirables.
Everyone applying for a visa to come to Australia will have their name checked against the database, which contains more than 400,000 people of interest.
They include terrorists, serious criminals, those involved in organised immigration rackets, people who have previously breached their visa conditions and those known to be carrying significant health risks.
More than 7000 of the people on the list are named as war criminals, particularly in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
The new set-up will use better computing technology to analyse the names and pseudonyms of terrorists, many of whom have common or complex names.
Almost 10,000 people a day are checked against the alert list before coming to Australia.
In the past year the number of names on the list has increased by around 25 per cent.
A departmental spokesman said the new system was likely to be operating by June.
"Substantial improvements in name search algorithms, quality assurance of records, technical expertise and the MAL work environment will ensure that the risk of missing a genuine match is minimised," the spokesman said.
"The system enhancements include a change in the processing regime so that all applications are checked on MAL using the most rigorous name searching techniques at the earliest stage of application processing."
Late last year, a Muslim convert from Britain, Abdur Raheem Green, who has been named as a radical, was refused entry to Australia because he was named on the Immigration Department's Movement Alert List.
Mr Green, who has said Muslims "cannot live peaceably together" with Westerners, was due to make a series of speeches at mosques in Australia, but was stopped before boarding his flight to Australia from Sri Lanka.
The bolstered system will complement the Regional Movement Alert List, where travel documents are examined at the airport check-in counter, and passengers barred from boarding the flight if they are suspected of passport fraud.
New kinds of biometric information, including fingerprints, iris scans and photographs, will also be stored in the database to help protect Australian borders.
The collation of this information is currently on trial at Sydney airport, with a view to rolling out biometric testing nationally to prevent identity and passport fraud, which the Government has said has strong links to terrorist activity.
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