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Keywords: Signatory

  • RELIGION

    Seeking a more ethical way to stop the boats and deaths at sea

    • Frank Brennan
    • 14 September 2012
    4 Comments

    In the lead up to the election, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison are sure to continue insisting that the Gillard Government's Pacific Solution Mark II will not work. In all probability this will undermine the efficacy of the Gillard Solution in stopping the boats. Read the full text of Fr Frank Brennan's address to the Migration Institute of Australia, Menzies Hotel, Sydney, 14 September 2012 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Human lives Australia could have saved

    • Tony Kevin
    • 05 September 2012
    14 Comments

    Australian maritime safety and border protection authorities could have saved the lives of most of the people on the boat that made two distress calls by telephone to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority early last Wednesday. Instead they passed the responsibility to Indonesia, which has none of the sophisticated resources and technologies that Australia uses - when it wants to - to locate and intercept incoming unauthorised boats.

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  • RELIGION

    There is an ethical way to stop the boats

    • Frank Brennan
    • 23 August 2012
    11 Comments

    Behind all the legal technicalities and political argument about boat people, there is room for deeper ethical reflection and a more principled proposal. But first, to clear away some of the debris.

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  • RELIGION

    Australia takes the low road on asylum seekers

    • Frank Brennan
    • 17 August 2012
    26 Comments

    All major political parties now hope they can confine people in Nauru for years on end without any prospect of court supervision and without any need for Parliament to revisit the matter. We have reached a fork in the road between decency and deterrence. As a nation we have taken the low road, inviting the newest signatory to the Refugees Convention to emulate our indecent behaviour.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Updating the Malaysia solution

    • John Menadue
    • 26 July 2012
    9 Comments

    There is a lot of political point-scoring over whether particular countries have signed the Refugee Convention. But there is no signatory country on the route used by almost all asylum seekers fleeing to Australia. A regional framework must be built on what's available — such as the Malaysian agreement.

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  • RELIGION

    Australia's 20 year search for the right asylum policy

    • Frank Brennan
    • 26 June 2012
    18 Comments

    Last week’s tragedy of another mass loss of life at sea between Indonesia and Christmas Island focuses our minds yet again on an intractable public policy problem for Australia – our search for a coherent, workable and moral asylum policy.

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  • RELIGION

    Oakeshott's Malaysia Solution loophole

    • Frank Brennan
    • 16 April 2012
    22 Comments

    His proposed amendment to the Migration Act is designed to remove the peg on which the High Court hung the Malaysia solution out to dry. It is a convoluted means for allowing the executive government to declare an offshore processing country without meaningful scrutiny by Parliament or the High Court.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    More asylum seeker blood on Australia's hands

    • Susan Metcalfe
    • 13 March 2012
    16 Comments

    Reports into the death of a 28-year-old Afghan asylum seeker inside an Indonesian detention centre reveal he was bound, burned with cigarettes and beaten to death with a blunt object. The Australian Government and the Coalition must accept some responsibility for the death.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Baby steps in 'reformed' Burma

    • Duncan Maclaren
    • 15 February 2012
    5 Comments

    Burma has embarked on a series of reforms that have altered its pariah status. But Burma's icon of democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi, does not fully represent all Burmese, and there are vast problems that must be addressed before sanctions are fully lifted.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Breaking the 'boat people' deadlock

    • Lyn Bender
    • 30 January 2012
    37 Comments

    In his book They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayor writes of 'the slow lobster boil of erosion of freedom' in Nazi Germany. As a daughter of Jewish refugees I know what this entails. The same process confronts asylum seekers today if we do not begin from a presumption of rights and humanity. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Don't stoop to stupid policy over boat tragedy

    • Aloysious Mowe
    • 20 December 2011
    10 Comments

    Of course we want people to stop making the hazardous boat journey to Christmas Island, but tow-backs and off-shore processing are immoral and stupid. Australia must engage with others in the region to find ways to ensure people are not driven to make desperate journeys.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Time to fix leaky nuclear treaty

    • Justin Glyn
    • 23 November 2011
    5 Comments

    Given the leakiness of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, it is scarcely surprising that Australia is not concerned about the possibility of breaching it in selling uranium to India. If the world is serious about developing real safeguards against nuclear proliferation, the treaty needs to be replaced, not ignored.

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