With parliament sitting next week, the home affairs minister is pressuring Labor to support a repeal of the medevac law. But the law has worked just as it was intended.
Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh have been stuck in makeshift camps for years. They are now being targeted by criminal gangs, alongside public health and well-being issues.
A refugee policy built on deflecting the issue, rather than confronting it, is not sustainable. We cannot continue to ‘contract out’ our international obligations.
Displaced by the terrorist insurgency in Northeast Nigeria, refugees aren’t wallowing in self-pity. They’re mobilising whatever resources they can to rebuild livelihoods.
Dutton continues to insist the government could be compelled under the medevac legislation to transfer criminals, although the legislation gives the minister power to veto people on security grounds.
Unlike prior waves like the enslaved people on the Underground Railroad or Vietnam-era war resisters, they are children whose parents fear deportation after spending years in the United States.
Mexico says it emerged from tariff negotiations in Washington with its ‘dignity intact.’ But that dignity comes at great cost to the migrants fleeing extreme violence in Central America.
It’s critical that the Australian government take a new direction in refugee policy and move beyond its tired rhetoric of deterrence as a justification for detaining refugees on Nauru and Manus.
Ancient Rome and its empire had the concept of asylum at its heart. Its legacy provided inspiration for centres of power around the world, but today outsiders are no longer welcome.
Migration governance without immigration detention is desirable and achievable. Eliminating all detention will universally benefit citizens, migrants and everyone in between.
Human rights organisations worry that the UNHCR may be helping refugees return to war zones and, as an enabler of repatriation, are helping Kenya to violate refugees’ rights
Professor of International Migration and Forced Displacement and Director of the Institute for Research into International Migration and Superdiversity, University of Birmingham