Pregnant 23 year-old Somali refugee, Abyan (pseudonym), will return to Australia for expert treatment, although the dates for her travel are unconfirmed. UNHCR spokesman Rupert Colville said that Abyan had refused to give information to the Nauru police because she is afraid of reprisals and that Australian and Nauru must enable Abyan to obtain mental and physical care and to terminate her pregnancy if she desires.
The Nauruan Government responded to the Australian media's coverage of Abyan's case, labelling questions put to the Government "ridiculous". Nauruan Justice Minister David Adeang said in a statement that "Nauru has no obligation to answer the Australian media" and that the "media approaches us with great arrogance and an air of racial superiority, which is highly offensive to us".
Amnesty International released a report, entitled By Hook or by Crook, into claims that Australian officials paid people smugglers to return a boat of asylum seekers to Indonesia in May. The report includes photos, videos and interviews with 65 asylum seekers, the boat crew and Indonesian police.
A spokesperson for Amnesty International said that "from the evidence we gathered, the asylum seekers were arbitrarily and unlawfully detained. That is a human rights violation”. Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Peter Dutton, criticised the report, describing the investigation into boat turnbacks as an "ideological attack". Minister Dutton vowed that the government was "not going to take a backwards step" nor "water down [its] policies".
Meanwhile, Australian doctors and other medical professionals gathered in cities across the country to call on the government to remove all children and their families from immigration detention.
Internationally, former Prime Minister Tony Abbott delivered the Margaret Thatcher Lecture in London, using the opportunity to call for Europe to adopt the Coalition Government's asylum seeker policies to address the current migrant crisis. Mr Abbott told an audience of British conservatives that Europe's compassion for refugees was leading it into "catastrophic error".
Read the Kaldor Centre's weekly news roundup.