Immigration department secretary Martin Bowles has said his department was seeking advice about new data on the mental health problems of children in detention, not trying to cover it up. Bowles was responding…
If a visit to Christmas Island sounds like fun, think again. A remote tropical island in the Indian Ocean – billed as a birdwatcher’s paradise and a haven for snorkelling – has a dark side. It is “home…
Two characteristics of this government are that it regularly overreaches and that where possible it shies away from transparency and accountability. Very different issues in the news this week highlight…
Immigration minister Scott Morrison should cease to be the legal guardian of unaccompanied asylum seeker and refugee children, a church-sponsored report has urged. Instead, an independent guardian should…
Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has been forced to capitulate and agree to bring to Australia the 157 Sri Lankan Tamil asylum seekers who have been held in a Customs vessel on the high seas for weeks…
My interview with Mr Syed did not get off to a great start. We’d arranged to meet at the Dandenong library – part of the city council building, a huge, bright orange edifice in the redeveloped heart of…
The full bench of the High Court will hear the case of 157 Sri Lankan asylum seekers currently on an Australian customs vessel over two days, starting on August 5. But when the High Court issued an injunction…
Following the shocking news of the destruction of flight MH17, foreign minister Julie Bishop wasted no time in boarding a plane for the United Nations in New York. Australian diplomats engaged in intense…
From the perspective of the global north, Australia has always been an oddity. Its policies often seem as strange and inexplicable as its fauna. “They are strange those Australians, strangers to the world…
Lawyers for 153 Sri Lankan asylum seekers on a boat intercepted by the Australian government applied for a full bench of the High Court to hear its case on August 5 at a directions hearing on Friday. Whereas…
The Australian government has become the great defender of Sri Lanka’s post-war human rights credentials, it seems. But Sri Lanka’s (and Australia’s) insistence that the end of the civil war means an end…
Australia’s courts serve us well, acting independently in their application of the law. However, that doesn’t protect them from attacks for performing their legal and constitutional duties. Similarly…
The Australian government gave an undertaking to the High Court on Wednesday that it would not surrender or deliver the asylum seekers detained on an Australian customs vessel on the high seas to Sri Lankan…
It took a High Court case to get the government to admit what it had refused to acknowledge to the Australian public – that it is holding 153 asylum seekers on the high seas. The government has over-reached…
Later today, the High Court is due to hear a challenge to the screening and transfer of a boatload of Sri Lankan asylum seekers back to Sri Lankan authorities. Under international law, return of persons…
The government has confirmed that the Australian navy detained a boatload of asylum seekers before transferring them to the Sri Lankan navy or return to their country of origin. Yesterday, in response…
The High Court has issued a temporary injunction to stop the Australian government transferring more than 150 asylum seekers, who are on a boat unheard of publicly for more than a week, to Sri Lankan authorities…
There’s a time-tested ‘law’ in the history of modern self-government: when a bounded nation-state democracy prosecutes war abroad, the spirit and institutions of its democracy are usually vandalised at…
What is offensive about this government is not that it is pursuing tough policies, but that it is trashing accountability and is so lacking in empathy. The boats did need to be stopped; the budget does…
The Abbott government’s asylum seeker policy is heartless, selfish, non-transparent, possibly in breech of international law, certainly a violation of progressive international norms – but it seems to…