According to a poll taken last December, 60% of those surveyed think the Australian government should “increase the severity of the treatment of asylum seekers”. What’s behind this negative sentiment (otherwise…
The transfer of asylum seekers to detention centres in Papua New Guinea is a clear violation of Australia’s international law obligations.
AAP/Eoin Blackwell
This week’s Four Corners investigation on the circumstances surrounding the death of Iranian asylum seeker Reza Barati at the Manus Island detention centre in February was uncomfortable viewing. The ABC…
Largely lost in the politics of Tony Abbott’s campaign to ‘stop the boats’ is the fate of refugees.
AAP/Ava Benny-Morrison
The Abbott government has celebrated the 100th day without any asylum seeker boats reaching Australian territory. This is the result of policies that favour the protection of borders rather than of people…
Interpol says one billion passengers travel without proper identity checks.
EPA/Barbara Walton
It has emerged that two of the passengers on the missing flight MH370 were travelling on stolen passports. Initially this was thought to suggest that terrorism might be involved in the disappearance, but…
We crossed the courtyard and followed 16-year-old Amin around the back of the house. We removed our shoes, walked down the dark hallway and turned into the small dark room. The two youngest children sat…
Round-the-clock news coverage of every boat arrival helps create the perception Australia is facing a crisis.
AAP/Jon Faulkner
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…
Are we prepared to talk about migration as a solution to climate change?
AAP Image/Courtesy; SBS Dateline, Supplied by Hussein Khoder
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…
Survivors of last week’s Lampedusa boat sinking, which is estimated to have left hundreds of African migrants dead. What can Australia learn from the tragedy?
EPA/Ettore Ferrari
The recent event of yet another boat sinking off the coast of Lampedusa in Italy resulted in the death of hundreds of migrants with still more unaccounted for. Despite the tyranny of distance, the incident…
The UN Security Council’s statement on the humanitarian and refugee crisis developing in Syria may be a start, but will it actually help those displaced?
EPA/Jamal Nasrallah
After finally passing its first resolution on the Syrian crisis late last week, the United Nations Security Council has now turned its attention to the humanitarian crisis now unfolding within the country…
The latest in a “succession of true slaughters of innocents”. This is how Italian president Giorgio Napolitano described the incident in which hundreds of migrants, mainly from Eritrea and Somalia, died…
Both sides of politics are in a race to the bottom in the mistreatment of asylum seekers.
EPA/STR
I had a conversation with Tim Costello some years ago which significantly changed my way of seeing things. He told me of a time when he was running the Collins St Baptist Church. A guy who had been sleeping…
Taking sides: medical targets in Syria threaten medical neutrality.
Dominic Lipinski/PA
Annie Sparrow, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
New York Times columnist Nick Kristof recently nominated Syria as the world capital of human suffering. He has a point. It’s not just the bombs, bullets, and now gas rained down upon the civilian population…
More than half of Syria’s refugees are children.
Oxfam International
A new city rises up in the Jordanian desert. Zaatari is now “home” – at last count – to 144,000 Syrians. The numbers are scarcely credible. One million child refugees; two million exiles in total; another…
The intractable asylum seeker issue has dominated Australian politics like no other recently. Where will it play most in the coming election?
AAP/Paul Miller
The vexed issue of asylum seekers arriving by boat on Australian shores has dominated our political psyche for over a decade. Prime minister Kevin Rudd’s announcement shortly after returning to office…
The Coalition’s has proposed to return to temporary protection visas to clear the backlog of asylum seekers awaiting processing in Australia.
AAP/Steve Lillebuen
For me, the TPV is a prison. Our life is without hope, or purpose. The simplest thing that a person wants in his life is hope. Without hope, life is meaningless. - Iraqi temporary protection visa holder…
A man in the second group of asylum seekers transferred to Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island calls out to journalists, 2 August 2013.
“We want to end the tick and flick approach of this [Labor] government that has seen nine out of 10 people found to be refugees when that doesn’t match what we are seeing in other places around the world…
Reports of the decision made by some Swiss towns to ban asylum seekers from public spaces are depressingly familiar here in the UK. So too were the recent comments from Roman Staub, mayor of the town of…
The suffering of the Iranian people is a moral and an economic issue that Australia can help to solve.
Image from shutterstock.com
Over recent months, Iran has become the largest source of asylum seekers arriving in Australia, with more than 5,000 having arrived this year, amounting to about one-third of the total. While the debate…
It’s not hard to see that caging people indefinitely behind razor wire does considerable harm.
AAP
Linda Briskman, Swinburne University of Technology et Scott Poynting, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
It was a foolish moment when prime minister Bob Hawke promised that by 1990 no child in Australia would be living in poverty. After all, what are the solutions to child poverty, to crime, to educational…
Each adult Australian citizen would have the right to sponsor one person selected from the register every five years.
DFID UK Department for International Development
The people of Armidale, a NSW country town which benefits from the cosmopolitanism associated with the presence of the University of New England, are tolerant and open-hearted. They might well appear as…
Professor of International Migration and Forced Displacement and Director of the Institute for Research into International Migration and Superdiversity, University of Birmingham