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Articles on Asylum seekers

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The government should have focused on a proper investigation into allegations that asylum seekers’ hands were deliberately burned by the Navy. ABC

Navy burns: the government’s obligation to investigate

The Abbott government has reacted indignantly to allegations by Sudanese asylum seeker Yousif Ibrahim Fasher that asylum seekers were mistreated and had their hands deliberately burnt by Australian Navy…
Past failures cannot detract from the significance of documenting current abuses of children Stephen Mitchell

Back to the future: revisiting the treatment of child asylum seekers

The 1,000-plus children currently detained in immigration detention facilities in Australia and Nauru are at risk of serious mental health and developmental problems. The Human Rights Commission this week…
The ABC has been insufficiently sceptical of video ‘evidence’ for allegations that the Australian Navy mistreated asylum seekers. ABC

ABC, forgetting lessons of 2001, pays for its lack of scepticism

The ABC’s handling of allegations that Australian Navy personnel deliberately injured asylum seekers has become nastily entangled with an array of complex issues. These include: the politics of ABC bias…
The Tampa showdown in 2001 prompted playwrights to tackle the topic of asylum seekers. AAP Image/Wallenius Wilhelmsen

Refuge and refusal: why theatre about asylum seekers matters

When, some eight or nine years ago, I began researching the responses of Australian and refugee theatre makers, filmmakers and writers to asylum seeker debates it was very easy to share the hopes for political…
Australia has a duty to ensure asylum seekers who are facing trial after being sent to Nauru are not denied their rights to proper legal process. AAP

Australia has an obligation to support the rule of law in Nauru

Australia should respond to the extraordinary actions of the government of Nauru in deporting and terminating the employment of its only magistrate, Peter Law, and denying its Chief Justice, Geoffrey Eames…
Should Australia change tack on its relationship with Indonesia and start keeping the nation at ‘arm’s length’? EPA/Romeo Gacad

Fatal attraction: is our relationship with Indonesia worth the trouble?

The decision by the Australian government to turn asylum seeker boats back into Indonesia’s territorial waters and its ports was always a high-risk game. It is no surprise that it has ended in a serious…
Dutch and French Huguenot refugees were the targets of fear and restrictions in 16th-century England – not unlike those who seek asylum in Australia. AAP Image/Jon Faulkner

The asylum seekers who frightened Elizabethan England

Would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper that, breaking out in hideous violence, would not afford you an abode on earth … What would you think to be thus used? This is the strangers…
The navy is permitted to intercept vessels in Australian waters, but the high seas or Indonesian waters are a different matter, as are tow-backs to another country. AAP/Scott Fisher

Explainer: the legal implications of ‘tow-backs

Australia has been engaging in “tow-backs” of asylum-seeker boats. This has involved intercepting boats carrying asylum seekers at sea, before they reach Australia, and forcing them to return to Indonesia…
For fleeing Sri Lankans who literally bear the scars of war that may be enough to attract brutal treatment as LTTE suspects when their boats are intercepted. AAP/CNN

Australia dangerously close to the abuse of fleeing Sri Lankans

I was the only lady in the group that was caught by [CID](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Investigation_Department_(Sri_Lanka) [Criminal Investigation Department]. CID beat the men but to me they…
Called to account: G4S and Serco executives appear at the Public Accounts Select Committee last year. PA Wire

G4S and Serco deserve censure for treatment of asylum seekers

On Friday, the National Audit Office released a report detailing its investigation into the COMPASS housing project, a series of contracts between the Home Office and three service providers – G4S, Serco…
Hiding the government’s border control policy behind the word ‘operational’ makes the military their political pawns. AAP/Scott Fisher

Operation Sovereign Borders: dignified silence or diminishing democracy?

Recent reports that the Australian Navy has turned back two asylum seeker boats to Indonesian waters remain shrouded under a veil of secrecy. Australia remains subject to downgraded levels of co-operation…
2013 saw a decisive change of government in Australia. What else happened? AAP/Lisa Maree Williams

2013, the year that was: Politics + Society

Three prime ministers, four Labor Party leaders, two popes. 2013 was nothing if not a hectic year for the Politics + Society desk at The Conversation. And while it’s repeated so often as to go beyond being…
Round-the-clock news coverage of every boat arrival helps create the perception Australia is facing a crisis. AAP/Jon Faulkner

Seeing refugee flows in a broader context points to a better way

Before 9/11 and the “Tampa” episode in 2001, Australia played a thoroughly constructive and decent role in refugee resettlement following World War Two and the Vietnam War. This happened despite a cultural…
Temporary protection visas punish asylum seekers for arriving in Australia without a visa. AAP/Eoin Blackwell

Traumatising and inhumane: why TPVs have to go

People smuggling has cost the lives of at least 1,199 people between August 2008 and November 2013. Those fortunate enough to survive these tragedies at sea face enduring trauma: mandatory detention, loss…
The UN has criticised Australia’s housing and transfer of asylum seeker children in offshore processing facilities on Manus Island and Nauru. AAP/Eoin Blackwell

Offshore processing centres are no place for asylum seeker children

Recent reports that three asylum seeker children have been transferred from Nauru back to Australia because of concerns about their health raises a more fundamental question that lies at the heart of Australia’s…
Thousands of people are in domestic servitude in the UK, and many are migrants. Photographer: Evil Erin

To end domestic servitude, first fix immigration policy

Details are still emerging in the case of three women who claim to have been held as slaves for three decades in a suburban house in London. The Metropolitan police have stated that a 69-year-old Malaysian…
It’s uncertain what effect Indonesia’s downgrading of diplomatic and military relations will have on Australia’s asylum seeker policies. EPA/Tubagus

Stopping people smuggling requires more than just Indonesia’s help

Australian-Indonesian military relations have been downgraded in recent days following Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s decision to reduce military co-operation until he receives an explanation…
Are we prepared to talk about migration as a solution to climate change? AAP Image/Courtesy; SBS Dateline, Supplied by Hussein Khoder

Migration is a solution to climate change, not a threat to security

How to deal with the impact of climate change is front and centre at international climate talks in Warsaw, with a fund for “losses and damages” caused by climate change to developing nations on the table…
The ABC’s Four Corners program investigated the people smugglers allegedly behind this asylum seeker boat, which sank off the coast of Java in September this year. AAP

Four Corners: human smuggling and the spectacle of suffering

Last night, the ABC’s Four Corners program fed us with yet another 50 minutes worth of emotional, heartbreaking and harrowing testimonies of traumatised survivors of yet another human smuggling tragedy…
Swapping asylum seekers for refugees is unlikely to be the panacea that the federal government hopes it will be. AAP

Outsourcing refugee policy: the Australia-Indonesia ‘people swap’

For those of us with a long enough memory of asylum politics, discussion this week of a “people swap” deal between Indonesia and Australia harks back to earlier plans by the then-Labor government to exchange…

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