Chip in to take Peter Dutton's cruelty to court #Season4Justice: Mums 4 Refugees and Grandmothers against Detention of Refugee Children NSW fundraiser for the National Justice Project, who provide urgent pro bono legal help to people on Nauru and Manus.

Broken Men in Paradise (New York Times, 9 December 2016). "The world's refugee crisis knows no ( Read more... )

Hazara asylum seeker says he is being sent back to Afghanistan (GA, 23 April 2016)

Desperate refugees arrested trying to return to Manus Island centre (SMH, 22 April 2016) "Three refugees who have left Manus Island to try and rebuild their lives in Lae after being granted refugee status have returned to the island, saying they feel safer in the ( Read more... )

Remaining two refugees in Cambodia rue leaving Nauru (SMH, 13 March 2016) | Tracking down two refugees in Cambodia (SMH, 19 March 2016) | Greens refer $55 million refugee resettlement deal with Cambodia to the Auditor General (SMH, 13 March 2016). Sickness, poverty, misery - and Australian lies.

Asylum seeker who suffered heart attack on Manus to ( Read more... )

This week, the High Court gave the go-ahead to a legal challenge to offshore processing brought by the Human Rights Law Centre, which argued that the government does not have the legal authority to detain people overseas or to pay for their detention. The government and the opposition hastened to pass legislation closing the "loophole". (Amongst ( Read more... )

The big news of the last couple of weeks is that both the previous Labor and the current Coalition governments have paid bribes to people smugglers. In the Coalition's case, those bribes were paid to smugglers to take their passengers back to Indonesia in two boats provided by Australia - a "suicide mission".

The bribes, totalling $US31,000, may ( Read more... )

Asylum seekers registered with UNHCR in Indonesia after June no longer eligible for resettlement in Australia, Scott Morrison says. Also, fewer places (450, down from 600) will be made available for the ten thousand asylum seekers and refugees currently in Indonesia, making the wait for resettlement here much longer. Exactly how this will keep ( Read more... )

Indonesia's president-elect Joko Widodo has told our PM it's unacceptable for the Australian navy to enter Indonesian waters when turning back asylum seeker boats. Immigration Minister Scott Morrison retorted that Indonesia has benefitted from the turnbacks, as they have stopped people-smuggling, which the haven't. Neither country mentioned the ( Read more... )

The Australian Navy has forced at least five asylum seeker boats back into to Indonesian waters, violating Indonesia's borders, a serious action which has understandably angered our neighbours and is the subject of a Navy inquiry (the results of which may not be made public, hey ho.) The forcing back of boats may be illegal under the Refugee ( Read more... )

On to Indonesia, our neighbour to the north, a country which does not allow refugees to settle and therefore is a source of many of the "boat people" trying to reach Australia. There's been tension all month between the two countries over our government's "turn back" policy ( Read more... )