teleSUR | December 13, 2019 With 169 votes in favor, nine abstentions, and two votes against, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Friday extended the mandate for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) until June 30, 2023. “The General Assembly… expresses special commendation to the Agency […]
It could be called a gulag mentality, though it finds form in different ways. In the defunct Soviet Union, it was definitive of life: millions incarcerated, garrisons of forced labour, instruments of the proletarian paradise fouled. Gulag literature suggested another society, estranged and removed from civilian life, channelled into an absent universe. Titles suggested as much: Gustaw Herling’s work was titled A World Apart
The modern UN Refugee Convention is now so flea-bitten it’s been put out to the garbage tip of history. At least the enthusiastic fleas think so, given their conduct as political representatives across a range of parliaments keen on barbed wired borders and impenetrable defences. Across Europe, the issue of refugees arriving by sea – in this case, the Mediterranean – has become a matter of games and deflection.
The passage of amendments to the Migration Act 1958 (Cth) by the Australian House of Representatives and the Senate this week was less a case of celebration than necessitous deliverance. The mental wellbeing of asylum-seekers on Manus Island and Nauru, or lack thereof, has been documented extensively from Australian legal representatives to members of Médecins Sans Frontières.
It is an organisation not without its problems.
Journalism is getting something of a battering in Australia. At the parliamentary level, laws have passed that would be inimical to any tradition versed in the bill of rights. (Australia, not having such a restraining instrument on political zeal, can only rely on the bumbling wisdom of its representatives.) At the executive level, deals have been brokered between Canberra and various regional states to ensure minimum coverage over the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. Secrecy is all fashion.
Press TV – December 1, 2017 The United Nations General Assembly has voted to declare as null any Israeli measure to practice jurisdiction over Jerusalem al-Quds, days before US President Donald Trump decides whether he would relocate the US embassy to the occupied city. In a rare show of unity against the Tel Aviv regime, […]
Australia’s Victoria Supreme Court has ordered the Australian government to compensate hundreds of asylum seekers for illegally detaining them in squalid conditions and systematically subjecting them to inhuman treatment on the remote island of Nauru.
The final class action settlement, reached in a lawsuit brought by Slater and Gordon law firm, is estimated at US$56 million, according to Press TV.
Having poured scorn and not an indecent amount of bile upon the refugee deal between the Obama administration and Canberra last year, US President Donald Trump was never going to make things easy for the resettlement of various groups held on Nauru and Manus Island.
The boat, along with other means of travel, is often undertaken as a matter of freedom. Movement keeps one alive in times of peace, and in conflict. The Australian government, and those backing its practices, have wished over the years to limit, if not halt, such movement altogether.
