The U.N. refugee agency said Wednesday that governments around the world, especially in the Global North, which includes the United States and countries in Europe, are increasingly undermining the global convention on refugees and asylum-seekers — even threatening its very existence.
The stark warning by UNHCR came on the 75th anniversary of the U.N. Refugee Convention, a 1951 document that defines who refugees are and outlines the responsibilities of countries hosting them.
Deciding to take all possible action to prevent Israel’s genocide should not be complicated, especially when, as our reports have found, the majority of victims are children, women and the elderly, when children are intentionally targeted and sexual violence is weaponised to terrorise all Palestinians and undermine their right to self-determination, and when starvation is used as a weapon to destroy the group.
“This report provides the clarity we need to courageously live up to our obligations under international law and act to stop the genocide. A failure to stand up for peace with justice in Palestine will ultimately be failure to stand up for peace with justice everywhere,” said Melanie Morrison, director of the Sydney Peace Foundation.
The reality is that Australia has entered into a binding, decades-long arrangement, and the $2.5 billion price tag is only the most visible cost. With interest, Nauru stands to make more than $7 billion from the arrangement.
Less visible, but more corrosive, is the damage done to our democracy when secrecy is used to avoid scrutiny. The public still doesn’t have access to the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) underpinning this arrangement, despite it costing the Australian taxpayer billions. Both the Labor and Liberal parties supported the decision not to publicly release the MoU.
Political language about immigration wasn’t always so negative.
At the end of the second world war, then-Prime Minister Ben Chifley welcomed 170,000 refugees and other displaced people from Europe.
In the 1970s, when the first boats of Vietnamese asylum seekers arrived in Australia’s north, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser insisted they be treated humanely and processed fairly.
There is open despair inside the Liberal Party about how to rebuild its standing in multicultural communities after its new colleague in the party room Jacinta Nampijinpa Price's inflammatory comments about Indian migrants put the brakes on that already monumental task.
Filling empty jobs
Ararat, like most regional towns, has an ageing population and a drift of young people to the cities.
The program is reinvigorating the town and creating a vibrant, multicultural community.
"It gives our local employers confidence that they can invest and grow, which is really giving a boost to this community," said Tim McDougall, the council's economic development lead.
"Not only in [the] workforce but the way that they live and integrate with this community."
Migrants, refugees make up worker shortfall in Ararat. By Tim Lee, ABC News
Jane McAdam from the Kaldor Centre said migration should be seen as a key part of solving — not causing — national challenges.
"We really need to take a good, hard look at the evidence when it comes to looking at what is driving those pressures and looking at how the government at all levels needs to be addressing things like the housing crisis without wrongly demonising migrants in the process," she said.
"Australia is a country full of migrants and it's migration that has made us. Multiculturalism has made us such a flourishing, diverse, and successful society and country that we are."
The major parties have been accused of “stitching up” a deal to transform Nauru into Australia’s “dumping ground and penal colony” as parliament passed laws stripping basic legal rights from a group of noncitizens set to be deported.
The home affairs legislation passed the Senate on Thursday, after a snap three-hour parliamentary hearing the night before.
The bill amends the Migration Act “to provide that the rules of natural justice do not apply” for noncitizens on a removal pathway and validates government visa decisions – made before the high court’s NZYQ ruling in November 2023 – that could subsequently have been deemed unlawful.
The Nadesalingams and Biloela community's tandem story has been transformed into a work of theatre that has been meticulously crafted by Brisbane-based Belloo Creative theatre company over the past four years, and will have its world premiere as part of Brisbane Festival.
Back to Bilo is an immigration story that needs to be told and retold. By Velvet Winter, ABC News
Multicultural Australians have described the fear, hurt and disappointment sparked by the anti-immigration rallies held across Australia this weekend, even comparing it to memories of the White Australia policy.
March for Australia demonstrations took place in capital cities and regional centres on Sunday, with known neo-Nazis speaking at events in Sydney and Melbourne and large counter-protests formed in many locations.
Meanwhile, experts are raising concerns about the strategies far-right groups are using to attract ordinary Australians.
We must fight for the Australia we wish to see – the one that welcomed me, an unaccompanied minor orphaned by war…………
………….That same government is making secret deals worth almost half a billion dollars with questionable overseas regimes to ship migrants and refugees offshore, all while avoiding accountability and scrutiny.
The irony is that it wasn’t all that long ago that Australia was offering for the population of Nauru to move here. In the 1960s, Australia offered Nauru an island off the Queensland coast as a relocation option. Scientists predicted that Nauru would be uninhabitable by the mid-1990s due to the extensive damage wrought by phosphate mining carried out by Australia, New Zealand and Britain. That plan never eventuated because the Nauruans did not want to become part of a racist White Australia and lose their distinctive identity as a people.
Secret refugee deal with Nauru just moves the problem out of sight. By Jane McAdam, SMH
The prime minister said the arrangements to deport about 280 members of the NZYQ cohort, a group of non-citizens living in the Australian community whose visas were cancelled on character grounds, were “hardly secret” on Monday.
However, Albanese refused to answer how and when the payments would be made to Nauru, and how long the agreement would last.
Australia’s immigration figures are not at record highs, migration experts say, rejecting claims aired at rallies on Sunday.
The government says Australia’s net overseas migration figure is actually down 37% from a recent peak, countering claims aired by those behind the weekend’s anti-immigration rallies.
An anti-immigration protest called March for Australia is planned to take place in cities across the country on Sunday.
The march has been condemned as hateful by the Albanese government, and is being promoted by a grab-bag of neo-Nazis, so-called freedom fighters – who gained prominence during the pandemic – and other fringe groups.
The Australian government has signed a $400m deal with the government of Nauru allowing it to deport hundreds of foreign-born criminals whose visas were cancelled on character grounds.
The home affairs minister, Tony Burke, travelled to Nauru on Friday to sign a memorandum of understanding with president David Adeang, which states Australia will pay around $70m a year in addition to an upfront fee.
The deal relates to about 280 non-citizens in the Australian community who are known as the NZYQ cohort, who previously faced indefinite immigration detention. These people could not be deported to their home countries because they faced persecution, or because those countries refused to accept them.
The beautiful community support for Priya and Nades led the Government to do the right thing in their case. I am giving everything I can to my community – I worked in aged care, and volunteered for the Red Cross – but I have had to become an activist to fight for my family and everyone failed by the broken Fast Track system. Still, the Government expects us to leave.
The government is seeking to bolster its new powers to deport non-citizens to third countries by removing the obligation to provide people subject to such decisions procedural fairness.
If passed, the laws would apply to three men released as a result of the landmark "NZYQ" High Court decision who are currently slated to be sent to Nauru under a deal.
Government moves to bolster powers to deport non-citizens to Nauru. By Maani Truu, ABC News
Australia has pressed Nauru for more detail about a claimed billion-dollar investment agreement that it has signed with a mysterious Chinese company, as federal government officials scramble to ensure the Pacific nation is not breaching a landmark treaty it signed with Australia just nine months ago.
Late last year, Australia signed a sweeping new treaty with Nauru, promising to provide ongoing budget and security support in return for effective veto power of decisions on national security.
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