Amnesty International's refugee coordinator, Dr Graham Thom, and former Labor Senator and United Nations Association of Australia president Professor Margaret Reynolds are among those who have backed a call for a royal commission
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Human rights commissioner Sev Ozdowski announced on November 28 that he would conduct an inquiry into the effect of immigration detention on children, in particular investigating whether Australia's detention practices are in
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The United Nations' declaration that the 1990s would be the international decade for the eradication of colonialism was supposed to usher in a 21st century free from colonial enslavement. Yet in September of the first year of that
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While the spotlight may have moved off refugee detention centres, the misery of asylum seekers there has worsened. On November 18, six Iranian asylum seekers escaped from Woomera, the "hell-hole" of Australia's detention centres,
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Since the Coalition's election win on November 10 the backlash against the government's attack on asylum seekers, a policy that was wholeheartedly supported by the federal Labor opposition, has continued to grow. Former Liberal
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In the days before the November 10 federal election, the Australian government's punitive policy toward asylum seekers began to backfire on the Coalition government. A wave of former prime ministers, former Labor and Liberal
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As the imperialist powers escalate their war on Afghanistan, refugees continue to flee in their tens of thousands, joining millions in Pakistan and Iran. The scale of the humanitarian crisis is immense, with several million Afghan
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Refugee-bashing has proved a winner for Prime Minister John Howard, helping him boost his government's popularity to the highest it has been since the 1998 election. Yet while opinion polls are backing the government's draconian
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Borderline: Australia's treatment of refugees and asylum seekersBy Peter MaresUNSW Press240 pages, $32.95 pb "There is a contradiction at the heart of Australian society", writes Peter Mares in Borderline. "Like the United States
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A 19-metre, rotting, leaky Indonesian fishing boat, with a capacity for 150 passengers, picked up more than 400 asylum seekers from Lampung on October 18 to make the journey to Christmas Island. A few hours out to sea, the boat
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Federal Labor leader Kim Beazley has made much of the fact that Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri has so far refused to discuss the issue of asylum seekers with the Howard government. During the Tampa incident, Megawati
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The government released its mid-year budget review on October 17. A key feature of the review was the allocation of large sums on top of existing funding for coastal surveillance and detention of asylum seekers arriving in