Tamil activists to pay for safe transportation for refugees to Australia

Sydney -  Tamil activists would pay for refugees to be safely shipped to Australia after approval from the United Nations, depriving smugglers of potential customers.

The move comes under a radical pitch to Prime Minister Julia Gillard government's expert panel on border protection, The Age reports.

The plan, aimed at ethnic Tamils fleeing Sri Lanka, comes as a boat carrying 15 people slipped past navy patrols on the weekend and put out a distress call about 150 kilometers off the coast of Western Australia.

The plan to fund 'free, safe transport' was presented by Tamil organizations to Gillard's experts charged to find a circuit breaker to the impasse around asylum seekers.

The panel, led by former Defence Chief Angus Houston, will be hard-pressed to move all political sides beyond the deadlock, with little sign of common ground despite negotiations in recent weeks.

The submission, whose authors include Tamils Against Genocide, blames the recent increase in boats leaving Sri Lanka on human rights abuses aimed at the Tamil minority, despite the end of the civil war three years ago.

About 1300 Sri Lankans have reportedly reached Australia this year on boats, about 20 percent of more than 6500 asylum seekers are yet to arrive.

''Tamils face persistent risk of arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention, disappearance, extra-judicial killing and severe and punishing restrictions,'' the submission read.

''We see little possibility for a reduction in outward refugee flows. In other words Tamils in large numbers will continue to seek ways, safe or unsafe, to leave the island,'' it added.

In the submission the Tamil organisations offer to fund free passage on ships to Tamils with UN refugee status.

''(This) will undermine and help contain the problem of abusive and exploitative people smugglers and the risks to personal and international security their activities entail,'' it read.

But the submission acknowledges any plan to fund ships to bring refugees to Australia would need a change to anti-people-smuggling laws, a shift unlikely to win political backing.

Sri Lanka's High Commissioner to Australia, Thisara Samarasinghe, dismissed claims that people were fleeing because of human rights abuses in his country.

He told that racketeers were offering people passage to avoid Australia's strict standards for legal entry and coaxing people to lie about oppression.

''These people were not going because of any atrocities or anything, but they were going for a better life,'' he said.