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.

Sending Asylum Seekers to Nauru

By Refugee Rights Action Network On 11 September 2012

It was recently announced that the government would be sending asylum seekers to Nauru by the end of the week. Pictures have emerged on twitter from ABC journalist, Kirrin McKechnie, giving us a glimpse of what conditions on the island are at present. It does not paint a pleasant picture.

Nauru has only gutters and no drainage system, McKechnie reports, so flooding is prone when it rains which happens a lot on the small island.

Private corporation Transfield has received the contract for the services and maintenance of the centre opposed to usual contender Serco. Transfield is infamously known for having the maintenance contract for Homeswest houses – and even more infamously known for not maintaining these houses at all.

11 babies at Darwin Airport Lodge, one only just born on Sunday, are among those who will be transferred to the offshore processing centre.