PNG Prime Minister Peter O’Neill announced on April 27 that Australian-funded Manus Island detention center, which houses refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants will be closed. The future of the detainees still remains uncertain. They have the option to settle in PNG or return home. The latest figures show just one in four transferees are opting Read more
Peter Dutton, what do you do between the hours of midnight and 5am? Do you sleep? If so, I really must ask – how can you? Dozens of Australians sit up all night, every single night, comforting asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru. You don’t have to, therefore the task falls to the advocates. Read more
Papua New Guinea said on Wednesday it will close an Australian immigration centre on a northern island after its Supreme Court ruled it unlawful, but Australia ruled out accepting more than 800 asylum seekers detained there A spokesperson for Dutton did not immediately respond for requests for comment on the closure but Dutton said in Read more
Australia has agreed to take 12,000 refugees living on the borders of Syria and northern Iraq. It continues however to refuse entry to refugees on boats from Indonesia. The head of Australia’s Refugee Council says he expects Australia will soon ask New Zealand to help get it out of trouble with the Nauru asylum seekers’ Read more
Mohsen is late, but effusively apologetic as he sits down. “I can’t sleep at night for the nightmares,” he says. “In the dark I am back in that prison in my country,” – a middle-eastern country Guardian Australia has chosen not to name for fear of consequences for his family – “so instead I sleep Read more
Last Thursday, Human Rights Watch Australia published a report explaining that, despite two years of processing, very few detainees have left Australia’s Manus Island detention centre. The report is a fresh reminder that forced integration can throw up some wicked dilemmas, whether it is in Nauru or Australia’s other offshore resettlement facility on Manus Island, Read more
Weeks after Scott Morrison became immigration minister in September 2013, a 17-year-old Iraqi boy at the Manus Island detention centre alleged he was “on a list” of a group of Iranian men who planned to gang rape him. He was moved to another compound, but lived in fear at the camp until three months later, Read more
Dubbed by some “the Guantanamo of the Pacific”, Manus Island is home to one of Australia’s off-shore detention centres, where around a thousand asylum seekers are locked up. Australia does not allow journalists to visit the centres but the BBC’s Jon Donnison travelled undercover to Papua New Guinea to reach the camp on Manus island. Read more
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands is asking the PNG government and the Australian government to give the asylum seekers a full and efficient refugee status determination process in the Manus Detention Centre: To provide safe and humane conditions for the asylum seekers Not to force the asylum seekers Read more
The Salvation Army has attacked the Abbott government and its independent report on the Manus Island violence, maintaining the innocence of a worker accused of delivering the final blow to Reza Barati’s skull. Salvation Army’s chief executive Sharon Callister then attacked the government, claiming the organisation had been misrepresented by Immigration Minister Scott Morrison, and Read more