Opinion | Six years on from the Andaman Sea crisis, the Bali Process on human trafficking isn’t fit for purpose

When hundreds of Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshi migrants travelling to Southeast Asia in 2015 died after being abandoned at sea by smugglers, the ‘Bali Process’ forum promised action

Yet, years later, little has been done and the roots of the problem remain. Given the inaction of the forum’s co-chairs Australia and Indonesia, perhaps it is time to bypass the Bali Process entirely

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Rohingya migrants in a boat drifting in Thai waters during the Andaman Sea crisis of 2015. Photo: AFP

Published: 12:00pm, 27 Aug 2021

Six years on from the Andaman Sea crisis that claimed the lives of hundreds of Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshi migrants seeking passage to Southeast Asia, the region seems no nearer to mitigating the risks facing the victims of human trafficking and smuggling.

Indeed, the prospects of those who continue to be smuggled and trafficked across the sea remain as bleak as ever. But perhaps that should be no surprise; after all, the causes of the problem remain largely unaddressed.

Let’s cast our minds back to the first half of 2015, when some 32,000 people are thought to have attempted the perilous crossing. Up to 8,000 were reportedly abandoned at sea by smugglers, then subjected to a game of ‘human ping-pong’ as the countries they were trying to reach – Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia – each refused to take them. As a result, hundreds died, some while fighting over diminishing rations on boats that had been refused permission to land.

While those three countries took much of the subsequent blame, part of the region’s reaction to the crisis was to focus attention on the regional forum set up to prevent such tragedies – the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime of 2002, or more simply ‘the Bali Process’.

Critics charged that during the crisis the forum’s silence had been deafening, its inaction incomprehensible. Stung by those criticisms, the forum created a Task Force on Planning and Preparedness that was meant to provide a more effective response by coordinating national level plans and providing an early warning system. Its members also endorsed the 2016 Bali Declaration (reaffirmed in 2018), vowing to provide safety and protection to vulnerable groups.

In the intervening years that Task Force has met six times, yet the roots of the problem it is supposed to address remain as strong as ever. The pogroms and expulsion of the Rohingya in Myanmar’s Rakhine State continue, as do the operations of trafficking and smuggling networks. Little has been done to go after officials complicit in these syndicates.