Posts Tagged ‘Refugees & Migrants’
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
Nicolas Haque; 27/10/09
On Myanmar’s side of the Naf River that marks border with Bangladesh, labourers are hard at work building a fence that will prevent them fleeing persecution. They will not be paid for their work. Instead the men, who come from the persecuted Rohingya ethnic group, have been coerced into erecting the 230km long fence by the threat of violence against their families. The Rohingyas are a distinct ethnic group from Myanmar’s Rakhine State. The authorities in Yangon have refused to recognise them as citizens and they have been persecuted for their cultural difference and practice of Islam. For many, life in Myanmar has become so difficult that they have fled across the border to Bangladesh. Over the past year 12,000 Rohingyas have been caught crossing the border illegally. Now they are being forced to build a fence to prevent such escapes.
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Tags: Burma, Refugees & Migrants
Posted in Burma, Human Rights, Refugee & Migrant, Terrorism | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
Kerry Murphy; 7/10/09
Kerry Murphy is a partner with the specialist immigration law firm D’Ambra Murphy Lawyers. He is a student of Arabic, former Jesuit Refugee Service coordinator, teaches at ANU and is one of Australia’s top immigration lawyers recognised by last year’s Australian Financial Review Best Lawyers survey.
‘Complementary protection’ is a new idea in Australian migration law. A Bill to introduce complementary protection is now before the Parliament. It will extend Australia’s protection obligations to other areas of international human rights law which previously could not be directly accessed. The changes mean that people who previously did not meet the narrow refugee definition, but for various reasons could not be sent back to their home country, may now be able to get protection in Australia. This includes people who may come under the Torture Convention and International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Some examples of people who fit the complementary definition may include those who are at genuine risk of execution in their home country. In Iran, homosexuals have been executed, while in some countries women are at risk of execution for accusations of ‘adultery’, which in some cultures has a very wide definition. Such cases may or may not meet the refugee definition, but will benefit from complementary protection.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights, Refugees & Migrants
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, Refugee & Migrant | No Comments »
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
Alison Rehn; 2/10/09
More than 600 asylum seekers have been granted refugee visas in the past 10 months, more than the number of illegal arrivals recorded in the previous six years. As border protection authorities intercepted yet another boat yesterday, figures showed 645 asylum seekers – mainly from Afghanistan, Iraq and Sri Lanka – were granted visas and resettled on the mainland since the start of the year. The Department of Immigration said that as of yesterday there were 890 illegal arrivals and 16 crew staying in various immigration detention facilities on Christmas Island, including 726 people – all males – staying in the main detention centre. Another 58 people were staying at a different compound, 92 others – most of whom were families and minors – were housed in “alternative detention” at a construction camp with another 30 in community detention arrangements.
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Tags: Asia, Australia, Human Rights, Refugees & Migrants
Posted in Asia, Australia, Human Rights, Refugee & Migrant, Terrorism | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
Michael Pelly; 30/9/09; (2 Items)
A Federal Court judge has denounced the Refugee Review Tribunal for its treatment of a gay Bangladeshi couple, finding it twisted facts and ignored evidence as it heard their claim for asylum. Justice Jeffrey Spender said the tribunal’s ruling that the men were not homosexual and would therefore not face persecution in their homeland was “not an exercise in honest fact finding”. The men even took DNA tests to disprove claims they were related, but the judge said the tribunal had “irrationally and indefensibly” found the results indicated they might be cousins. The tribunal also found that one man was not a credible witness because he refused to answer questions about whether they used lubricants during sex on the grounds such matters were personal. Justice Spender said the tribunal decision was “deliberately calculated” to get round problems caused by a High Court ruling and “not made in good faith”.
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Tags: Australia, Homosexuality, Refugees & Migrants
Posted in Aboriginal, Australia, Homosexuality, Human Rights, Refugee & Migrant | No Comments »
Saturday, August 8th, 2009
Yuko Narushima; 8/8/09
Police are investigating immigration officials for possible criminal conduct in the kidnapping of a seven-year-old girl without her asylum seeker father’s knowledge. In 2003 immigration staff hatched an elaborate plot to spirit the child away to her mother in Tehran as her father, the legal custodian, was in solitary confinement at Baxter Detention Centre. Baxter closed in 2007. Australian Federal Police are now investigating to see whether officials committed a crime under South Australian law, overstepping federal deportation powers. Children cannot be removed from South Australia without a parent’s consent.The national co-ordinator for A Just Australia, Kate Gauthier, who brought the allegations, said immigration staff acted criminally. ”It’s this simple: someone took his child without permission and without his knowledge. You cannot tell me that is not a crime.”
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Tags: Australia, China, Human Rights, Refugees & Migrants
Posted in Australia, China, Human Rights, Racism, Refugee & Migrant | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
David Ignatius; 8/7/09;
I grew up in the shadow of Robert McNamara, almost literally. My father, Paul Ignatius, joined his team at the Pentagon in 1961 and remained with him through the Vietnam years as a close aide and, afterwards, as a friend. So for me, McNamara’s death evokes a whole world of relationships and dreams and reversals that characterised the Washington of the 1960s. I have a photograph that captures what 1961 felt like, if you were an 11-year-old watching the McNamara era dawn at the Pentagon. It shows my dad’s swearing-in for his first job at the Pentagon as assistant-secretary of the army, and my mother and me looking up at him with measureless pride and confidence. The McNamara family must have many similar photographs of those early days of “the best and the brightest”, before the phrase had developed a knife edge.
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Tags: Australia, Refugees & Migrants, Robert Macnamara, Vietnam
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, Terrorism, USA, Vietnam, War | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
8/7/09;(4 Items)
Tthe headline of your article on Malaysia’s attitude to asylum-seekers (“Malaysia not soft on boatpeople”, 2/7) is a contender for biggest understatement of the year. The atrocious mistreatment of asylum-seekers and refugees in Malaysia is long-standing and well-documented. A US Senate committee found that Malaysian officials transported asylum-seekers, including some who were registered with UNHCR, from detention centres to the Thai border for deportation, where they were at risk of being handed to traffickers (not smugglers) if they could not pay a ransom. The report stated that “those unable to pay are turned over to human peddlers in Thailand, representing a variety of business interests ranging from fishing boats to brothels”. Human Rights Watch has found that refugees and asylum-seekers in Malaysia are subject to arrest, detention, and deportation — the most fundamental breach of the UN Refugee Convention. Malaysia does not support the convention, but Australia does and should not be supporting or encouraging other governments in allowing such breaches; Andrew Bartlett Research fellow in migration law; Australian National University, Canberra;
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Tags: Australia, Malaysia, Refugees & Migrants, White Australia
Posted in Asia, Australia, China, Human Rights, Racism, Refugee & Migrant | No Comments »
Friday, June 12th, 2009
Andra Jackson; 12/6/09
A journey that began almost a decade ago for Aladdin Sisalem, when he fled persecution in Kuwait in search of a safer place to call home, is finally over. With his hair newly cut for the occasion, the Kuwaiti-born Palestinian yesterday joined 42 other refugees and migrants at a ceremony in Melbourne to become Australian citizens. Mr Sisalem’s nightmare journey included being held for 18 months — 10 of them on his own — on a Pacific island detention centre, where he became known as “the forgotten man” of Australia’s immigration policy. There he might have remained, but for a rubbish pile that provided his salvation. Yesterday Mr Sisalem revealed for the first time the story behind the front page photograph in The Age that alerted the world to his plight in 2003.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights, Refugees & Migrants
Posted in Australia, China, Human Rights, Racism, Refugee & Migrant | No Comments »
Saturday, June 6th, 2009
Farah Farouque; 6/6/09
Sometimes big stories are best told through the struggles of individuals. So when filmmaker Robyn Hughan was looking for a way to illuminate the contested issues surrounding refugees and detention in Australia, she found her subject in Carmel Wauchope. Now, by no account can this silver-haired Benedictine nun be regarded as ordinary. She’d taken a path rarely embraced even among women of her generation. Yet her ability to connect with ordinary people thrust into an extraordinarily fraught situation was something no documentary maker could resist. So Hughan decided to tell that big public policy story through a single nun’s struggle with the system. “There were so many people fighting against detention policies, but what struck me was her ability to connect on the human level,” the filmmaker says.
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Tags: Australia, Christianity, Refugees & Migrants
Posted in Australia, Christianity, Human Rights, Refugee & Migrant | No Comments »
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
David Marr; 4/6/09; (4 Items)
Early on the morning of April 16, just before their boat exploded off Ashmore Reef, asylum seekers sleeping in the cabin were roused and told to move onto the deck. Everything was calm. People were sleeping and reluctant to move. The sailors insisted. “There was this demand made,” a leader of the Brisbane Afghan community, Hassan Ghulam, told the Herald. “The navy officer on top of the boat, he told the others to go to the end of the boat. This was before the accident.”
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Tags: Australia, Refugees & Migrants
Posted in Australia, China, Human Rights, PNG / West Papua, Racism, Refugee & Migrant | No Comments »
Friday, May 22nd, 2009
Cameron Stewart; 22/5/09; (2 Items)
Australia faces a diplomatic rift with Sri Lanka after its high commissioner yesterday warned the Rudd Government not to accept Tamil refugees from its civil war. The forthright comments by Sri Lanka’s high commissioner in Canberra, Senaka Walgampaya, came amid growing fears that Australia could be swamped by Tamil asylum seekers following the end of the country’s bloody civil war this week. As many as 300,000 people, mostly Tamils, have been displaced by the conflict, forcing Canberra to send officials to Colombo to work with the Sri Lankan Government on ways to prevent a new wave of asylum seekers. Mr Walgampaya told The Australian yesterday that he saw no justification for Australia accepting any Tamil asylum seekers on either political or humanitarian grounds.
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Tags: Aid, Australia, Refugees & Migrants, Sri Lanka
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, Refugee & Migrant, Sri Lanka | No Comments »
Sunday, May 10th, 2009
10/9/08; The Sunday Telegraph, No Internet Text
A story by Glenn Milne on temporary protection visas (ST, 19/4) used the words ” more illegal refugees would try to reach Australia” Arrival by boat for the purposes of seeking asylum is not illegal under Australian law. Refugees, by definition, cannot be illegal refugees, as they have a lawful status; they have not broken a law and have not been prosecuted. So to use the phrase “illegal refugee” is not only incorrect, but accuses people of a crime that not only have they not committed, but does not actually exist. Such claims do not add any positive input to public discourse about a sensitive area of public policy: – Kate Gauthier, co-ordinator, A Just Australia.
Tags: Australia, Human Rights, Refugees & Migrants
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, Refugee & Migrant | No Comments »
Monday, May 4th, 2009
Paige Taylor & Patricia Karvelas; 4/5/09; (2 Items)
Open recreation areas have been set up as dormitories and dozens of bunk beds have been flown in to Christmas Island’s detention centre, where the imminent arrival of 136 asylum seekers and boat crew is placing pressure on resources. There are already 262 asylum seekers in various forms of detention on the remote island – the highest number since the mass arrivals that preceded the Tampa stand-off in 2001. The surge that began last September has so far delivered 411 asylum seekers to Christmas Island, and the rise in numbers, although good for local businesses, has created an expensive challenge for the Government. Last week, the Department of Immigration reverted to bringing in staff, contractors and supplies on commercial flights to save about $70,000 it had been spending each Thursday on a charter flight from the mainland.
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Tags: Australia, Refugees & Migrants
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, Indonesia, Refugee & Migrant | No Comments »
Monday, April 27th, 2009
Paul Maley; 27/4/09; (2 Items)
A top Sri Lankan official has played down the concerns of the Rudd Government that fighting in Sri Lanka could provoke an exodus of boatpeople from the country, saying most refugees were too poor to afford the journey. Sri Lanka’s high commissioner to Australia, Senaka Walgampaya, said most potential refugees in Sri Lanka did not have enough money to pay people-smugglers. As the Opposition yesterday renewed its attack on the Government’s handling of the boatpeople issue, Mr Walgampaya said most of the Sri Lankan asylum seekers who had arrived in Australia had been Sinhalese economic migrants. Referring to those affected by the fighting in Sri Lanka, he said: “These people don’t have the financial resources to pay anybody to smuggle them into Australia. The people who have the financial resources have earlier left these areas.”
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Tags: Australia, Education, Refugees & Migrants, Sri Lanka
Posted in Australia, Health & Children, Human Rights, Refugee & Migrant, Sri Lanka | No Comments »
Monday, April 27th, 2009
Paul Maley; 27/4/09; (2 Items)
A top Sri Lankan official has played down the concerns of the Rudd Government that fighting in Sri Lanka could provoke an exodus of boatpeople from the country, saying most refugees were too poor to afford the journey. Sri Lanka’s high commissioner to Australia, Senaka Walgampaya, said most potential refugees in Sri Lanka did not have enough money to pay people-smugglers. As the Opposition yesterday renewed its attack on the Government’s handling of the boatpeople issue, Mr Walgampaya said most of the Sri Lankan asylum seekers who had arrived in Australia had been Sinhalese economic migrants. Referring to those affected by the fighting in Sri Lanka, he said: “These people don’t have the financial resources to pay anybody to smuggle them into Australia. The people who have the financial resources have earlier left these areas.”
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Tags: Australia, EducationAdd new tag, Refugees & Migrants, Sri Lanka
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, Refugee & Migrant, Sri Lanka | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
Paige Taylor; 14/4/09
Three Sri Lankan fishermen are the first asylum seekers on Christmas Island to be charged with escaping custody after they bolted from the old detention centre last December at the height of the debate over the Rudd Government’s reluctance to use the island’s long-vacant new $400 million high-security centre. The new detention facility, built by the Howard government with security akin to a supermax prison, received its first detainees within days of the escape and recapture of the three Sinhalese Catholic men on December 19. Thusara Warnakulasuriya and brothers Endika and Sumit Mendis roamed the island for 11 hours after scaling a fence and walking away undetected by guards late on December 18 or in the early hours of December 19. They were found mid-morning near the island’s school by Australian Federal Police, who had earlier put up signs in the small community of 1400 people warning: “Three escaped detainees – do not approach.”
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Tags: Australia, Refugees & Migrants
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, Refugee & Migrant, Sri Lanka | 2 Comments »
