Weekly media wrap - 2 November 2015

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.

Weekly media wrap - 16 February

The Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) called for a Royal Commission into the policy of holding children in immigration detention, following the government’s release of its The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention report. The report found more than a third of children in detention in the first half of 2014 had serious mental health disorders. It found more than 300 children committed or threatened self-harm in a 15-month period, 30 reported sexual assault, nearly 30 went on hunger strike and more than 200 were involved in assaults.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott criticised the report as ‘a blatantly partisan politicised exercise’, questioning ‘where was the Human Rights commission when hundreds of people were drowning at sea?’ Professor Triggs said she made the decision to hold the inquiry last February because the release of children had slowed down over the first six months of the new Coalition Government.  

The government announced there would not be a Royal Commission into children in detention.

 More than 200 Australian organisations (including Asylum Insight) signed a letter calling on parliament to stop holding children in immigration detention.

Meanwhile, it emerged through Fairfax media that the government had sought the resignation of AHRC president, Professor Gillian Triggs.

The High Court ordered that the Immigration Minister grant a permanent protection visa to a Pakistani refugee. It unanimously found the decision by former Immigration Minister Scott Morrison not to grant the visa on national interest grounds because the man was an unauthorised maritime arrival was illegal.

Around 300 people were feared drowned after four people-smuggling boats sank in the Mediterranean. Twenty-nine people died of hypothermia aboard Italian coastguard vessels after being picked up from a boat adrift near Libya. 

Weekly media wrap - 11 January 2015

The group of 50 men on Manus Island with approved refugee applications are being prepared to move from detention to temporary accommodation at the Lorengau transit centre and then into the PNG community. They were told they would be treated like the local Papua New Guineans, but detainees are resisting this move for fear of violence from locals.

An Iranian asylum seeker who went without food for 51 days in the Wickham Point Immigration Detention Centre in Northern Territory during late 2014 has resumed his hunger strike. 

A teenage boy who was crew on an asylum seeker boat that arrived nearly two years ago will return home to Indonesia next week. He and another teenage boy have been kept in detention since their arrival, despite a government policy not to prosecute Indonesian children found on the boats. The second boy has also been released on parole and put in immigration detention.

Figures provided to Fairfax Media indicate that ten refugees have been released into the community since August 2014, after ASIO reversed their decisions that the refugees were threats to national security.

Prime Minister Abbott congratulated the new Sri Lankan president-elect Maithripala Sirisena and emphasised the two countries’ cooperation on addressing people smuggling and other issues.

Lebanon turned back Syrians attempting to cross the border under new visa regulations, which limit the amount of time they can stay in Lebanon. Lebanon is concerned about its capacity to accommodate more people displaced by the Syrian civil war.

UNHCR released its Mid-Year Trends 2014 report, which indicate that an estimated 5.5 million people became newly displaced during the first half of 2014. Of these, 1.4 million fled across international borders, with the remaining displaced within their own countries. Syrians have become the largest refugee population under UNHCR's mandate.