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Bob Carr ex Foreign Minister's views on so called asylum seekers

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9 yrs ago

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/policy/claims-of-tamil-persecution-in-sri-lanka-a-myth-says-bob-carr/story-fn9hm1gu-1226982849322

Ms Milne etc will not like this one bit.    He should know what he is talking about.

5 comments
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Abby
9 yrs ago

What I cannot understand is why would Australia return the boat to Sri Lanka when it originated in India ???

In which case it should not be a problem for the governtment to obey the court rulings.

This then follows the question as to why is the Refugee Council wasting the Taxpayers money.

They are Sri Lankans and India will not take them back ...

Rigorous imprisonment? Koutsoukis tweets, yesterday:

FIVE organisers of the boat carrying 41 Sri Lankan asylum-seekers have been remanded. The other 36 have been bailed. Children released without bail. Adults will be required to pay … around $40 AUD for bail.

 

Jared Owens, The Australian, ­Monday:

GREENS leader Christine Milne said the government had clearly breached international law by returning the asylum-seekers. “It is against all international law, it is against decency, it is in contravention of the United ­Nations and it’s appalling.”

 

Koutsoukis tweets, yesterday:

KASUN Jayasekara just said he was happy to be home and not in “an ­Australian island prison”. Sujeewa Saparamadu, 42 ... wife of … the man who organised the voyage … complains that Australian officials confiscated her iPhone 5, her daughter’s digital camera, and her husband’s gold credit cards.

 

 

In my view and after reading what those returned to Sri Lanka have said they were "economic refugees" (apart from one who chose to return back with the others).

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geomac
9 yrs ago

Guy Runcle Ctikey paywall

The "refoulment" -- a euphemism -- of the Sri Lankans is another matter entirely, because it now means that we have decisively abandoned the most basic principles of the Refugee Convention and demolished any moral limit that would prevent us from handing people back to their possible torturers, and eventually, murderers. It’s a measure of how crazily lawless and amoral we have become -- and how easily that is being normalised within Australia -- that people are being picked up in international waters by the Royal Australian Navy merely on the basis that they might be coming to Australia. This is an expression of the demented exceptionalism Australia has adopted -- that we license to ourselves any measures to preserve some pristine notion of the country, while the rest of the world copes with refugee flows vastly in excess of anything we could imagine. When a white Australian tourist is arrested in some country with shady police, we scream blue murder about international norms. Now we are the shady police. The hypocrisy is total.

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Abby
9 yrs ago

Geoff :)

From YLC members 153 asylum seekers remain at sea introduced by Drew

http://www.yourlifechoices.com.au/news/153-asylum-seekers-remain-at-sea

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geomac
9 yrs ago

However, four years after the end of a civil war that left up to 100,000 people dead, activists say the nation's human rights record remains atrocious and such abductions continue with disturbing regularity. After Iraq, Sri Lanka has the highest number of disappearances in the world, with fewer than half of the 12,000 on record solved.

White vans have become such a potent symbol for abductions in Sri Lanka that they have even spawned their own verb. Being "white vanned" is to be "disappeared" by shadowy groups linked to the security services.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/sri-lankan-activists-still-disappeared/story-fnb64oi6-1226744065795?nk=bc6a597f0569a97fff44af2633d105c4

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