The Australian government will pay $2.3bn to a subsidiary of a controversial American private prison operator to run the nation’s onshore immigration detention network, ending a longstanding deal with Serco.
It has faced serious allegations of misconduct in a series of civil and regulatory cases in the United States, which were revealed by the Guardian last year after MTC won the $420m Nauru contract.
A former United States ambassador has criticised the government's "feeble" excuse for not providing more assistance to Australian women and children trapped in northeastern Syria.
Peter Galbraith has travelled to the Kurdish-controlled region twice in the past fortnight to help return two Yazidi children to their mother.
He says both the government and Opposition are exaggerating the danger of sending personnel to help
They spoke of limited privacy and widespread exposure to harassment and violence. Of leering men at the gym. Of not having access to the canteen. Of inadequate medical and mental health support. Of living in a constant state of stress and anxiety. Of wanting to turn their lives around, but being banned from work, study or vocational training.
On Sunday, Dutton declined to reaffirm the commitment in an interview with Sky News, pointing instead to his plans for reducing permanent migration, without confirming numbers for net overseas migration.
“What we’ve said is that we want our migration program to step down in the first two years,” he said. “It will ramp up again in years three and four, and we will bring down the numbers who come through the humanitarian and refugee program, back to the long-run average of that.
“That’s what will work for our country. Again, we’ll have a look at the economic settings, as we said at the time of the policy announcement.”
A new push to bring home Australian women and children held in Kurdish-controlled Syria has been given added urgency following the weekend fall of Syria’s Bashir al-Assad government , say family members and a children's rights group.
The 42 Australian citizens are detained in camps in a north-eastern pocket of Syria controlled by US-backed Kurdish forces. This region was not taken by the rebel forces that captured the capital, Damascus.
This statement is attributable to Elizabeth Tan, Director of UNHCR's Division of International Protection.
UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is concerned at the passage of sweeping new laws by the Australian Parliament late last week which will allow for the transfer of people – including refugees, asylum-seekers, and stateless people – to other countries that have been paid to receive them.
UNHCR statement on Australia’s new detention and removal laws, Reliefweb
The inaugural Kaldor Centre Oration was delivered by Kate Eastman AM SC and Zaki Haidari on Thursday 21 November 2024 at the Playhouse Theatre, National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), in Sydney Australia.
Among their many accomplishments, Kate Eastman AM SC is a barrister at New Chambers and a Commissioner at the New South Wales Law Reform Commission, and Zaki Haidari is a refugee rights advocate with Amnesty International.
Their powerful, moving reflections – on the ‘Tampa affair’ and its ramifications for refugees in the years since – are now available as video and podcast recordings for you to revisit and share with others.
Mohammed Salamat delivered this anguished poem about his detention on Nauru outside Federal Parliament last Tuesday November 19, 2024. The reality of ‘offshore processing’ by the Australian government is still very much a fact, in legislation and the news.
“Barn of Broken Doors”: Nauru poet deplores offshore detention. By Mohammed Salamat, P&I
Legislation designed so refugees can be warehoused internationally, shipped around to client states for a fee; laws that strip mobile phones from asylum seekers in offshore gulags. Bills that restrict public commentary. Laws designed to keep children away from truth, keeping them safe, not from a world free of climate catastrophe and the hatred that cycles when you support genocide, but from TikTok and Facebook. A moral crusade, sepia-tinted nostalgia, cosy and comfortable. We’ve been here before.
Australia’s duopoly is cruel, captured and must be destroyed. By Dave Milner, The Shot
A handcuffed immigration detainee was injected with an antipsychotic drug without their consent as they were being forcibly deported by Australian Border Force officers.
“Contrary to claims of record-high migration, Australia is still far from catching up to the levels of migration that, in the pre-pandemic world, we expected to have had by now,” the study said.
The coalitionfication of the ALP is almost complete.
The first message comes from a senior lawyer. “Barbaric,” he writes. “Who are they? What are they?”
By the time he sends it, the Coalition is already boasting that it is running the immigration system for Labor. It doesn’t matter. There is no longer any difference between the major parties on refugees. The depravity is shared equally.
The treatment of asylum seekers is a national sickness. There are no limits to the vindictiveness. Nothing is too immoral. No measures are beyond the brutality of our ferret-eyed politicians.
The latest laws will allow the government to impose travel bans against entire countries. People will be deported to places they have never been, with Australia paying foreign governments to take them. There are prison sentences for anyone who does not comply. Those people currently in detention will have their phones confiscated.
Among the laws are new powers to cancel visas and overturn refugee assessments. Ankle monitors will again be used. The government is relieved of civil obligations and cannot be held liable for its negligence. The law has been filleted of its protections.
Among the laws are new powers to cancel visas and overturn refugee assessments. Ankle monitors will again be used. The government is relieved of civil obligations and cannot be held liable for its negligence. The law has been filleted of its protections.
“This government’s first priority is community safety…” Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said when he began introducing the suite of bills. “The first priority is not ankle bracelets or detention for these people, our first priority is: we don’t want them in Australia at all.”
Taken together, the new laws are the most radical assault on migrants since the White Australia policy. All they lack is a dictation test. Advocates warn that they could be used to round up migrants before the election. Refugee services say they have been inundated with phone calls from people worried about what will happen to them.
At the heart of these policies there is only cruelty. The government has forced them through in the last sitting week of the year because it anticipates a panic on refugees will shape the next election. Instead of confronting this panic, Labor has decided to join it. They have no shame. They have only opportunism and moral glibness.
The laws give the minister powers to monster tens of thousands of people. They will split apart families and demonise foreigners. They will indulge the worst impulses of the electorate, the mad desire to punish the most vulnerable in the belief that it will somehow make the country safer.
Labor is recording the passage of its three migration bills as a win. It is the opposite. It is the loss of another small piece of the nation’s already diminished soul.
Alison Battisson is a prominent Australian human rights lawyer. She has just spoken before the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in Geneva, Switzerland, on Australia's immigration detention centres and the cases of a number of Australians stranded overseas. SBS News' Essam Al-Ghalib has spoken with Ms Battison about her work, and the plight of three consular cases: Mohammad Munshi, a British-Australian mining worker jailed in Mongolia and barred from leaving; Robert Pether, imprisoned in Iraq; and Terry Holohan, detained in Mali earlier this month.
INTERVIEW: Alison Battisson speaks about arbitrary detention, SBS
Since February 24, 2022 the Australian government has granted more than 11,500 visas to Ukrainian refugees who were desperate to flee the conflict and find a place of safety.
After more than 1,000 days of Russia's invasion, Ukrainians who escaped the bloodshed have reflected on how they were able to escape and build new lives for their families in Australia.
The Australian immigration system has established a vicious cycle of violence that looks to be further entrenched with the three rushed migration bills.
Thousands of refugees who had believed themselves to have finally found safety will be targeted by the new migration amendment (removal and other measures) bill. It expands the minister’s power and allows the government to put refugees back again in prison camps, deport them or banish them to a third country.
The clock is ticking on Rosemary and Petrus Atep's time in Australia.
Seven years after purportedly fleeing death threats in Papua New Guinea, the aged care worker and her husband have become vital and valued members of their rural New South Wales community.
However, the couple and their eight children have just weeks to leave Australia, after their application for a protection visa was denied.
On Nauru, there are close to 100 asylum seekers who have been released from detention but are currently living hand-to-mouth.
They are forbidden to work on the island, and are surviving on a stipend of $230 a fortnight – which they say is not even enough for three meals a day.
The Australian government has mostly succeeded in keeping offshore processing off the front pages, but as boat arrivals continue, Nauru remains central to the Australian government’s immigration response.
Today, contributor to The Saturday Paper Denham Sadler on surviving on Nauru and whether Australia’s policy of offshore detention will ever end.
Guest: Contributor to The Saturday Paper, Denham Sadler.
Refugee advocates warn a government proposal to give the immigration minister sweeping new deportation powers would put people at risk of persecution and family separation.
The government says the bill meets its international obligations not to deport people to countries where they face the threat of persecution.
Among the 63 recommendations, the framework calls for political accountability, something Kamara said is vital for the livelihood of refugees.
590 Tahoe Keys Blvd, South Lake Tahoe, CA 96150