Recommendation 20

Despite the presumption that a person who has committed such a crime amounts to a ‘danger to the community’ remaining rebuttable, the proposal to lower the threshold for what constitutes a ‘particularly serious crime’ to any offence receiving a 12-month sentence would not be consistent with the language of Article 33(2) or with the humanitarian purpose of the Refugee Convention. The combination of the new threshold with provisions expressly denying an individual the opportunity to prove that he has not committed a ‘particularly serious’ offence would ‘expand the scope’ of Article 33(2) and ‘correspondingly weaken the principle of non- refoulement itself’. The Bill requires amendment to remove the lowering of this threshold.