The Australian government returned a boat carrying 21 asylum seekers to Vietnam. This brings to 28 the total number of boats carrying asylum seekers that have been turned back in the last three years.
In an interview with A Current Affair, Nauru’s Justice Minister David Adeang said refugees were ‘certainly living better’ than Nauruans and that there ‘was not much to complain about’. A Current Affair said the Australian government had no role in the program gaining access to Nauru and that the program gave no undertakings to deliver favourable coverage.
In an interview with The Guardian, psychologist Paul Stevenson stated that he has ‘never seen more atrocity than … in the incarcerated situations of Manus Island and Nauru’. Stevenson was fired by the immigration department due to secrecy provisions within the Australian Border Force Act 2015 (Cth).
On World Refugee Day, 20 June 2016, UNHCR released its annual global trends report. The report showed an all-time high of 65 million displaced persons globally. Of these, 21.3 million are refugees and 3.2 million are asylum seekers.