The world has reacted in anger, solidarity and protest to US President Donald Trump’s Muslim immigration ban.
Taxi drivers have gone on strike, major corporations such as Google are condemning it and protests continue at airports across the US.
Germany’s Angela Merkel and Britain’s Theresa May, not known as advocates for human rights, are speaking up in opposition.
As the people on Manus Island prepared to see in the New Year, drunken immigration officials and police beat up asylum seekers who were then taken into police custody and denied food and medical treatment. PNG politician Ronny Knight responded by tweeting “They deserved what they got”.
Barely a week earlier Faysal Ishak Ahmed, a Somali asylum seeker in Manus Island detention centre, died on Christmas Eve after months of being denied adequate medical treatment.
Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) students and supporters crashed the University of Sydney’s Vice Chancellor Michael Spence's Christmas party on December 13.
Activists rallied in Melbourne to protest the approval of a construction camp and rail line for the Adani Carmichael coalmine on December 5.
Some 2000 activists from a variety of campaigns came together in a rally in Sydney on December 10, International Human Rights Day.
Hundreds of days of protests by refugees on Nauru, landmark court decisions, the Nauru Files, politicians’ offices occupied, parliament interrupted, suicides in detention, damning international reports and many more people becoming active in the campaign for refugee justice is the story of the refugee campaign this year.
The significant growth of campaign groups and the development of new ones means we are in a better position to end the indefinite and cruel mandatory detention of asylum seekers and refugees.
A couple of hundred refugee rights activists turned out in Sydney on November 22 to protest the proposed refugee visa ban bill. Activists read poetry written by refugees while on Nauru and excerpts from the Nauru Files.
The offshore detention hellholes of Nauru and Manus Island are becoming increasingly unviable as more damning reports are published, court cases in Papua New Guinea continue, private service providers under the pressure of boycott campaigns decline to reapply for contracts and protests grow in Australia.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s latest plan — third country resettlement in the United States — is a reaction to this pressure, while also maintaining the policy of boat turnbacks, border security rhetoric and denying asylum seekers the right to be resettled in Australia.
Phone calls, emails, social media posts, street protests, visits to MP’s offices and Senate inquiry submissions are building momentum to block the federal government’s latest anti-refugee bill in the Senate.
The proposed legislation seeks to place a lifetime ban on any asylum seeker who comes to Australia by boat from ever setting foot in the country. It includes refugees who are resettled in another country and wish to come on tourist, business or partner visas decades later.
Aboriginal rights activists marched to Redfern's Department of Family and Community Services (FACS) on Monday 7 November to protest the forced removal of Aboriginal children from Aboriginal families by the child protection services.
Thousands turned out for the Doctors for Refugees marches in Sydney, Melbourne, Cairns, Newcastle, Darwin and Hobart on November 5 and other locations on previous days.
About 100 people, including the local community came out in Campbelltown on 30 October to protest "against the systemic violence and brutality by Australian police and corrections".