It all began to fall down with John Howard, accelerating through every successive government because of our obsessive national dread of “boat people”, to the point where — when it comes to how we treat asylum seekers — these days we flout the rules with a middle finger to posterity.
So it is that two recent decisions of the UN Human Rights Committee, calling Australia out for gross breaches of the ICCPR in relation to our treatment of refugees on the outsourced hellhole of Nauru, have been simply ignored by both the Australian government and — disgracefully — the Australian media.
Is international law even a thing anymore? Not when it comes to Nauru. By Michael Bradley, Crikey