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laiming that the number of refugees landing on the country’s shores has steadily increased in recent years, Law and Human Rights Minister Yasonna H. Laoly has reached out to Australia to seek assistance in solving the global humanitarian problem.

Yasonna said after a meeting with Australian Justice Minister Michael Keenan that the country faced problems in dealing with refugees because existing detention centers for refugees currently suffered from overcrowding.

“The asylum seekers are housed at community houses and detention centers and the houses and centers are operating above their capacity. We hope that through cooperation with the Australian government we will be able to solve the problem,” he said, adding that the number of refugees who had achieved resettlement was small.

Yasonna said that even with the assistance from two international institutions, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization of Migrants (IOM), the process of resettling the refugees would be long and arduous.

He said that given Australia imposed stringent regulations that prevented it from accepting a large number of refugees, Australia might instead provide more financial assistance to countries like Indonesia to help it deal with the problem.

“We hope the assistance can help us in building more detention centers,” he said.

As of April this year, Indonesia has received more than 13,500 refugees and asylum seekers. The majority of the refugees are in Makassar in South Sulawesi, Medan in North Sumatrea and Batam in Riau Island.

As a non-signatory of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, Indonesia does not have the authority to determine the status of asylum seekers and must wait for verification by the UNHCR. However, as part of international law, Indonesia cannot expel people facing persecution in their countries of origin.

A recent case of Sri Lankan asylum seekers who landed at Lhoknga Beach, Aceh, highlighted the hostility of Indonesian authorities to hosting more asylum seekers after hundreds of Rohingya Muslims arrived a year earlier.

Initially, the Sri Lankans were not allowed to leave their vessel, which authorities tried to push back out to sea. Some days later, when the boat was no longer functioning, the migrants were allowed to come ashore.

Yasonna said that other than the overcapacity issues, the ministry also dealt with the attitudes of local governments who objected to the presence of refugees in their respective areas, saying that the refugees could inject social problems into the community.

In November last year, Luhut Pandjaitan, then coordinating political, legal and security affairs minister, came up with a proposal to provide Australia with an island as a temporary camp to shelter the migrants.

Luhut made the proposal following an incident in which some asylum seekers were found stranded in some parts of the country’s territorial waters on their way to Australia.

Between 2012 and 2013, more than 18,000 people without visas arrived in Australia by sea, compared with just 7,300 between 2011 and 2012, according to data from the Australian government.

Laura Kemp, a spokesperson at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, said her country would remain committed to providing assistance to this global humanitarian problem, including to refugees in Indonesia.

“The country has provided a wide range of funding to enable migrants to return voluntarily from Indonesia to their country of origin. Around 5,200 migrants have accessed this program since 2000,” Kemp said in a statement to The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

She added that Australia had committed to increasing its annual intake of refugees from 13,750 to 18,750 by 2018-19. (fac)