Border Farce Refugee Lottery

Asylum seekers who flee their homes face the worst sort of lottery. Surviving their initial escape from danger, surviving the boat journey, getting a Temporary Protection Visa or being exiled to Manus or Nauru. It’s all a matter of chance, with little to do with justice or fairness. We give here a number of these outcomes that have been meted by Australia.

Asylum Seekers Communication Link: You can help

RRAN communicates daily with dozens of asylum seekers trapped in Australia’s detention centres both onshore and offshore. These men and women reach out to keep us informed about what abuses and transgressions are occurring. Often they do this in secret and at great risk to themselves. We need your help to keep the communication channels open.

Deportation Watch: Join to help stop deportations

With the new and even more unfair ‘fast-track’ processing, the government is going to be attempting to deport more and more refugees back to situations where their lives and safety are at risk.With the policy of boat force-backs we know that they have no compunction about returning people to directly to countries they have fled from and indeed straight back into the arms of their persecutors. All without any semblance of assessing these people’s claims for asylum.

We know that our government does not blink in the face of the rape of women and children on Nauru, or when staff murder refugees in detention on Manus Island.

We can be sure that they will not hesitate to return people to circumstances where it’s likely that they are tortured or killed. Indeed this has happened in the past.

If you want to help resist this, sign up for our anti-deportation SMS alert list. You will occasionally receive SMS messages calling for anti-deportation action. This often takes the form of handing out flyers at the airport or conducting protests to highlight the plight of a person slated for deportation.

Refugee activists scale fence at Leonora detention centre: Sat 28th Jan

By Refugee Rights Action Network On 30 January 2012

Video by Zeb Parkes, photos by Tristan Kewe

Following a day of stage managed and heavily censored visits for just a small number of the imprisoned teenagers, RRAN members climb up the fence of Leonora detention centre to throw tennis balls with messages of hope and to wave and ‘high five’ the young guys inside! Their look of joy was priceless!