Mission & Justice

18/9/08

Anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish feelings are rising in several major European countries, according to a worldwide survey released on Wednesday. The Washington-based Pew Research Center’s global attitude survey found that most Muslims in countries where they are in the majority worry about the rise of Islamic extremism at home and abroad. Majorities held that view in Indonesia, Pakistan, Tanzania, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Nigeria. Large numbers of respondents in several Muslim countries also identified struggles within their countries between people who want to modernize the society and those dedicated to maintaining fundamentalist practices of Islam.

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Dalya Dajani; 11/6/08

It was not difficult for 14-year-old Ahmad to choose whether to stay in school or drop out to work nearly two years ago. The young boy had been struggling academically and found little support from his teachers. There was even less support at home from his family, who were struggling to make ends meet. In a country where more children are joining the labour market each year, situations like Ahmad’s are not uncommon. The latest official survey on child labour in the Kingdom released by the Department of Statistics (DoS) yesterday, revealed that more than half of an estimated 32,676 working children between the ages of 5 and 17 no longer go to school. Nearly 85 per cent of them, like Ahmad, dropped out after the age of 12, with more than half citing disinterest or poor performance at school, while 38 per cent cited economic hardship as a main driving factor. Educational authorities last year acknowledged the endemic, noting that some 6,000 students, most of them in the 9th and 10th grades, dropped out of the public school system last year, with nearly half of them believed to have joined the child labour market. Respondents cited factors such as economic hardship, family discord and lack of support to overcome their struggles at home or school.The survey, carried out with the support of the International Labour Organisation on a sample of 15,000 families across the Kingdom, for the first time included street peddlers as well children working in the agricultural sector.

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Ean Higgins; 28/5/08

At lunchtime on Friday, Bangladeshi Hafizur Rahman was working as a printer in Sydney’s western suburbs, with his boss Iain Ramsay singing his praises as the sort of skilled and keen employee the company needs. By that afternoon, Mr Rahman’s 12-year struggle to build a life in Australia was ended by the Department of Immigration, which ordered him to leave the country by June 6 and stripped him of his right to work. Mr Rahman was ordered to present within two weeks a plane ticket out of Australia. Barring an extraordinary reprieve, Mr Rahman has come to the end of the road in his claim that he is a political refugee from a repressive regime in Bangladesh. After all his legal avenues failed, Immigration Minister Chris Evans examined his request for ministerial intervention and ruled that he did not qualify for political asylum.

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