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Fearing Immigration: The Australian Coalition and the Return of Bad Habits
Killing political leaders – metaphorically and actually – often ushers in a silly season where the Mad Hatter presides over an imbecilic party. Amidst coups, defections, dethronements and confusions on the right of Australia politics, we see ugly topics return to the fore with ghastly predictability. The Liberals, the Nationals, and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation […]
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Three New Kinds of Refugees in a World of Migrants
Rashid Diab (Sudan), Out of Focus, 2015. One summer evening, the unrelenting sun over Niger refused to dip below the horizon. I sought out some shade with three anxious men in Touba au paradis, a small quiet restaurant in Agadez. These three Nigerians had tried to make the crossing at Assamaka, to our north, into […]
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Beware the Derogators: The Geneva Conventions Turn 75
On August 12, 1949, the four Geneva Conventions were adopted, laying the basis of a normative standard in international humanitarian law. As Balthasar Staehelin, personal envoy of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) president to China, stated at an anniversary event at the Swiss Embassy in Beijing, “In the past 75 years, the […]
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Terminating Partnerships: The UK Ends the Rwanda Solution
The dishonour board is long. Advisors from Australia, account chasing electoral strategists, former Australian cabinet ministers happy to draw earnings in British pounds. British Conservative politicians keen to mimic their cruel advice, notably on such acid topics as immigration and the fear of porous borders. Ghastly terminology used in Australian elections rhetorically repurposed for the […]
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Israel, Russia, and International Law
International law―the recognized rules of behavior among nations based on customary practices and treaties, among them the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights―has been agreed upon by large and small nations alike. To implement this law, the nations of the world have established a UN Security Council (to maintain international peace […]
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When Safety is a Fiction: Passing the UK’s Rwanda Bill
What a stinking story of inhumanity. A country intent on sending asylum seekers to one whose residents have actually applied for asylum and sanctuary in other states. But the UK-Rwanda deal, having stalled and stuttered before various courts and found wanting for reasons of human rights, has become law with the passage of the Safety […]
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Banished from Pakistan: Islamabad Moves on Afghan Refugees
Across the globe, refugees, always treated as the pox of public policy, continue to feature in news reports describing anguish, despair and persistent persecution. If they are not facing barbed wire barriers in Europe, they are being conveyed, where possible, to third countries to be processed in lengthy fashion. Policy makers fiddle and cook the […]
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The Politics of Indefinite Detention in Australia
The High Court of Australia is not known for its zealotry in protecting human rights, and certainly not when considering the persuasive pull of international law and conventions. The Australian Parliament is usually given a generous hand in making policies that tend to outrage such conventions, a freedom made that much easier by an absence […]
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Cruel Prerogatives: Braverman on Refugees at the AEI
Suella Braverman has made beastliness a trait in British politics. The UK Home Secretary, fed on the mush and mash of anti-refugee sentiment, has been frantically trying to find her spot in the darkness of inhumanity. Audaciously, and with grinding ignorance, she persists in her rather grisly attempts to kill the central assumptions of international […]
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Nauru’s Refugee Stain: Australia’s Continued Offshore Processing Regime
The last refugee, for now, has left the small, guano-producing state of Nauru. For a decade, the Pacific Island state served as one of Australia’s offshore prisons for refugees and asylum seekers, a cruel deterrent to those daring to exercise their right to seek asylum via the sea. Since July 2013, 3,127 people making the […]
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