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Keywords: Sri Lanka

  • AUSTRALIA

    Asylum seekers stiffed by election year spin

    • Kerry Murphy
    • 11 February 2013
    16 Comments

    The ad hoc nature of arrangements for asylum seekers in Nauru and PNG reveal that priorities are being determined by election dates rather than respect for human dignity and international human rights laws. The latest Coalition idea to interdict boats from Sri Lanka outside our territorial waters and send them back is particularly ill-considered.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    We all lose when governments trash the law

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 11 December 2012
    15 Comments

    Evidence about the persecution of returned Sri Lankan asylum seekers calls into question the justice of summary repatriation. And the actions of the Australian Government have thrown doubt on its legality. The rule of law is a delicate web of relationships that protects the weak from the tyranny of the great, and we are all weaker when it is broken. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia's bad job of asylum seeker policy

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 15 November 2012
    11 Comments

    You can tell bad policy making by the trail of broken human lives it leaves behind it. The image of asylum seekers held in tents on Nauru, many on hunger strike and at least one now in risk of death, will surely be followed by images of people withering from depression and resentment and needing medical care.

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  • RELIGION

    Seeking a more ethical way to stop the boats and deaths at sea

    • Frank Brennan
    • 14 September 2012
    4 Comments

    In the lead up to the election, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison are sure to continue insisting that the Gillard Government's Pacific Solution Mark II will not work. In all probability this will undermine the efficacy of the Gillard Solution in stopping the boats. Read the full text of Fr Frank Brennan's address to the Migration Institute of Australia, Menzies Hotel, Sydney, 14 September 2012 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Updating the Malaysia solution

    • John Menadue
    • 26 July 2012
    9 Comments

    There is a lot of political point-scoring over whether particular countries have signed the Refugee Convention. But there is no signatory country on the route used by almost all asylum seekers fleeing to Australia. A regional framework must be built on what's available — such as the Malaysian agreement.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Economic hard times even tougher for refugees

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 19 June 2012
    11 Comments

    The readiness of developed nations to help and receive refugees and asylum seekers has come under greater strain. Xenophobia has intensified in Europe, where Greece's Golden Dawn party threatened to expel migrants from schools and hospitals if elected.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Targeting aid workers

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 03 April 2012

    Australian aid worker David Savage was severely injured by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. The Taliban tried to kill him in revenge for the shooting of 17 unarmed Afghan civilians by a deranged American soldier. In more innocent times aid workers were regarded as angels by all sides.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    More asylum seeker blood on Australia's hands

    • Susan Metcalfe
    • 13 March 2012
    16 Comments

    Reports into the death of a 28-year-old Afghan asylum seeker inside an Indonesian detention centre reveal he was bound, burned with cigarettes and beaten to death with a blunt object. The Australian Government and the Coalition must accept some responsibility for the death.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The truth about airborne asylum seekers

    • John Menadue
    • 07 March 2012
    9 Comments

    The High Commissioner for Refugees has warned Australians about 'populist explanations ... and fears that are overblown'. He clearly had the Coalition in mind. One-liners and slogans don't make for credible refugee policy. Neither does recycling failed policies of the past.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Songs and stories of Sri Lanka's war

    • Martin Mulligan
    • 23 November 2011
    5 Comments

    After a meal cooked in the distinctive Jaffna way, the multi-talented Professor treated us to a repertoire of his own songs about his mother, victims of the 2004 tsunami, and those who had suffered during the war. Songs and stories of lived experience, translated into all the languages of Sri Lanka, might achieve more than the government's Reconciliation Commission.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Putting the faith back into development

    • Duncan Maclaren
    • 27 October 2011
    3 Comments

    The development theory of 'modernisation' taught that old traditions, including religion, had to disappear for people to be 'developed'. This purely Western model is now seen wanting. All faiths put the human person, not economic theories, at the centre of development.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Asylum seekers testing Labor's conviction

    • Susan Metcalfe
    • 07 April 2011
    22 Comments

    Paul Keating said: 'Governments that wander along uncertain about where they are, looking over their shoulder, invariably get run over themselves.' If Labor doesn't stop looking over its shoulder on asylum seekers, it will miss another opportunity to stand up for what it says it believes in.

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