The Albanese government is scrapping a crucial visa program for Afghans who worked for Australia, including interpreters who supported Australian soldiers.
But a military lawyer helping Afghans escape the country insists he's now "quietly confident" for his clients, after the government allowed hundreds who had previously been rejected to reapply in the interim.
‘As the night descended, they came and killed’: Sudan’s other war. By Virginia Pietromarchi, Al Jazeera
Harrowing accounts emerge from refugees who cross the border to escape fierce fighting in Sudan's West Darfur region.
The testimonies are hard to independently verify due to the blackout, but they are similar to those of refugees in other camps who described the indiscriminate killing of civilians, the ransacking of hospitals and the burning of entire neighbourhoods in different parts of Darfur.
Have we turned a corner on growth in asylum applications? By Abul Rizvi, Pearls and Irritations
Since international borders re-opened, asylum applications at the primary stage steadily grew from a low of around 618 in February 2022 to 1,786 in March 2023. While this was well below the peak in 2017-18 of around 2,500 per month, it would have been worrying the Albanese Government given the entry of the Coalition and Murdoch press into the public debate on asylum numbers.
Have we turned a corner on growth in asylum applications? By Abul Rizvi, Pearls and Irritations
Government denies incoming Australian refugees were part of citizenship negotiations. By Gill Bonnett, Radio New Zealand
The NZ government has scotched suggestions a deal bringing refugees from Australia to New Zealand is part of a tradeoff for policy changes on citizenship and 501 deportees.
RNZ revealed this week that most of the 450 refugees in a three-year agreement on former detention centre occupants are already living in Australia.
About 30 refugees are due to arrive next month.
Human rights and wrongs: the Australian calling out oppression at home and around the world. By Daniel Hurst, The Guardian
Undeterred by the scale of challenges in her in-tray, the new head of Human Rights Watch, Tirana Hassan, says ‘We need to be standing with those people’
“I think it’s most important that Australia actually is not scared to hold China to account and we expect to see Australia being a really important leader at, for example, the UN human rights council and within the multilateral fora, where these issues are being discussed,” she says.
But for Australia to improve its credibility to speak up on the world stage, it has also been urged to address its own deficiencies.
‘I just have you’: the rural Australians helping Afghan asylum seekers find refuge. By Dellaram Vreeland, The Guardian
A musician living in Wal Wal, population 27, in the Wimmera, Victoria is offering hope to a displaced family of six from Afghanistan.
Base costs. Editorial in The Saturday Paper
The numbers are these: Australia will spend $485 million this year running its prison camp on Nauru. It will do this to maroon 22 refugees, about half as many people as there are seats on a school bus. Divided, it costs $22 million per person, per year to continue this gruesome charade.
It is not hard to imagine how many people could be helped with this same money, how many thousands of refugees could be shown compassion. Instead Australia has chosen the ugly expensiveness of torture.
Nauru offshore processing to cost Australian taxpayers $485m despite only 22 asylum seekers remaining. By Paul Karp and Tory Shepherd, The Guardian
Department of Home Affairs officials revealed the new figures at a Senate estimates hearing on Monday evening, but disputed suggestions from the Greens this amounted to a cost of $22m a person.
Officials expect that in the next year no refugees and asylum seekers will remain on Nauru, but maintaining facilities for offshore processing will continue to cost at least $350m a year as a “contingency” to send people in the event of future boat arrivals.
Behrouz Boochani, the refugee writer who exposed the cruelty of Australia’s island jail. By Caitlin Cassidy and Marni Cordell, The Guardian
One inmate became the voice of the men locked up on Manus. Behrouz Boochani and Ben Doherty look back at the risks he took to get this story to the world.
Grandmothers for Refugees NSW website archived from today
Click on link below to access Grandmothers for Refugees NSW archived website.
How a leaked USB stick became the Nauru files – a tale of brutality and despair told in 160,000 words. By Caitlin Cassidy and Marni Cordell, The Guardian
It was March 2016 and Paul Farrell, then a reporter at Guardian Australia, had agreed to meet an anonymous source.
He had been reporting on immigration for several years but still, when he was slipped a USB stick across the table and told, “I think it might be of interest to you,” he had no idea what to expect.
“I booted it up and what flashed on to the screen was most comprehensive archive I’d ever seen of what was happening at the Nauru [immigration detention] facility at the time,” he says.
'Grave fears': Albanese government faces legal action over Australians detained in Syria. By Jessica Bahr, SBS News
International aid organisation Save the Children is acting as a litigation guardian for Australians detained in Syria, describing the camps as the "worst place in the world to be a child".
Legal action has been launched against the federal government in a "last resort" effort to repatriate Australian women and children trapped in Syrian detention camps.
Mat Tinkler, CEO of international aid organisation Save the Children, said the legal proceedings would seek to repatriate around 40 children and their mothers from Syrian camps to Australia.
Immigration detention and human rights, Australian Human Rights Commission
As of 31 January 2023, there were 1061 people in immigration detention facilities. A further 516 people, 146 of whom are children, were living in the community after being approved for residence determination. 10, 728 Unauthorised Maritime Arrivals, 1334 of whom are children, were living in the community after being granted a Bridging Visa E.
Immigration detention and human rights, Australian Human Rights Commission
Clare O'Neil MP Addresses the National Press Club of Australia (27/4/2023) - video
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil outlines the way forward for a once-in-a-generation reform of the migration system.
Clare O'Neil MP Addresses the National Press Club of Australia (27/4/2023) - video
Journey to Freedom : Jaivet Ealom (Video 7:38 mins)
Fourth-year University of Toronto student Jaivet Ealom fled persecution as a Rohingya in Myanmar, only to be held in Australian immigration detention centre for more than three years. Here, he recounts his daring escape.
UN refugee chief condemns Australia’s offshore detention regime and slogans like ‘stop the boats’, The Guardian by Ben Doherty
Speaking at the University of Melbourne’s Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, Grandi said: “Far too often, rich countries have a myopic approach to global forced displacement and population movements, focusing overwhelmingly on border controls.”
Grandi said governments rarely responded strategically to the arrival of significant numbers of people forced to move.
“They are seen as either someone else’s problem, or something unmanageable to deal with when it reaches domestic borders or shores. The reality is that simple slogans like ‘stop the boats’ are no more effective a solution to this challenge than those that say ‘let them all in’.”
How to go about achieving better immigration policy and decision-making By Peter Hughes, Pearls & Irritations
The construction of the Department of Immigration and Border protection (2014-2017) and Department of Home Affairs (2017-) and Australian Border Force (2015) was based on the explicit message that immigration was no longer a nation-building operation, but a junior part of a threat mitigation organisation. The cult of the border and Operation Sovereign Borders ruled supreme. There was more talk about the importance of guns for Australian Border Force members than client service.
Thousands of Australian visa decisions may be affected by high court ruling, experts warn. By Paul Karp, The Guardian
A majority of judges of the high court found that home affairs department decisions in line with the 2016 instruction not to send cases to the minister unless they met subjective criteria were not consistent with the Migration Act, which gives the power to intervene to the minister “personally”.
Political prisoners': Palm Sunday protesters demand visas for refugees stuck in limbo, SBS Source: AAP
Protesters in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne held placards reading, "Permanent visas for all" and "10 years too long", and accusing the government of "using refugees as political prisoners".
Rallies were also planned for other capitals and major regional centres.
We provided health care for children in immigration detention. This is what we found, The Conversation
While the last children were released from locked detention at the end of 2018, Australian law and policy still mandate detention for children arriving without visas. While the government refers to “held” or “locked” “detention”, to be plain, these children were imprisoned for seeking asylum.
We have just published a study describing the health of asylum-seeker children who experienced detention attending our Refugee Health Clinic over the past ten years.
Our team has been seeing refugee children for more than 20 years. We have extensive experience in refugee health, forensic medicine and child development, but nothing prepared us for the complexity of looking after these children.