Day care centre for Colombian refugees in Ecuador.
Governments across the world are erecting walls and tightening laws to keep refugees out, but one country is taking a radically different approach based on the simple premise that “no one is illegal”.
The Andean nation of Ecuador, with a population of 15.7 million people, is no stranger to the challenges of dealing with refugee crises.
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Day care centre for Colombian refugees in Ecuador.
Governments across the world are erecting walls and tightening laws to keep refugees out, but one country is taking a radically different approach based on the simple premise that “no one is illegal”.
The Andean nation of Ecuador, with a population of 15.7 million people, is no stranger to the challenges of dealing with refugee crises.
The Intervention: An Anthology
Edited By Rosie Scott & Anita Heiss
Concerned Australians, 2015
$25
“The Intervention to us was like Australia declaring war on us and in the process they demonised and dehumanised Aboriginal men, women and children,” says Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, Aboriginal elder and 2015 Northern Territory Australian of the Year.
Demonstration in solidarity with West Papua. Honiara, Solomon Islands.
Indonesian police beat two West Papuan students in Yahukimo, Papua Province, on September 16 for handing out leaflets about the Pacific Islands Forum.
Singapore's general election on September 11 returned the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), led by Lee Hsien Loong, to office with 69.9% of the vote and 83 out of 89 elected seats. This is an increase of almost 10% on their vote in 2011.
This result, which went against the predictions, was a huge setback to the opposition parties. Only the Worker’s Party (WP) was able to hold onto one Single Member Constituency (SMC) seat, Hougang, and one five-seat General Representative Constituency (GRC), Aljnunied. Even in Aljunied the WP only just held on with 50.1% of the vote.
Campaigning kicked off on September 8 for the first competitive elections in Myanmar (Burma) since the 1950s. The November 8 poll will pit the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) against more than 100 opposition parties, including Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD).
Myanmar’s military ceded power to a quasi-civilian government through 2010 elections that were boycotted by the NLD, ending a military dictatorship that spanned from 1962.
Venezuelan foreign minister Delcy Rodriguez. Caracas, September 17.
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez said on September 17 that international media were looking to “scam” the world over what is happening on the border between Venezuela and Colombia.
Nicolas Del Cano.
Initiated just over four years ago, the Left and Workers Front (FIT) in Argentina has scored some breakthroughs, quickly earning its place on the national political scene.
After police violence stopped refugees crossing Serbia-Hungary border, many went to Croatia. Some have since reached Austria and Germany. Croatia-Serbia border, September 18.
Hungarian riot police used tear gas and water cannons against crowds of refugees and migrants on September 17. Clashes at the Horgos-Roszke border crossing with Serbia lasted for hours, after hundreds of refugees and migrants protested to demand entry to Hungary.
The Australian Tamil Congress (ATC) has welcomed a September 16 report released by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which "identified patterns of grave violations in Sri Lanka between 2002 and 2011, strongly indicating that war crimes and crimes against humanity were most likely committed by both sides to the conflict".
Vanished: The Mysterious Disappearance Of Mustafa Ouda
By Ahmed Masoud
Rimal Press, 2015
US$20, 205 pages, pb
There is an act of violence in Ahmed Masoud’s Vanished: The Mysterious Disappearance Of Mustafa Ouda that reverberates throughout the novel. An act done in a perfunctory way, described in a short sentence that compels the reader to sit up, if not choke.
Popular Melbourne community radio station Triple R has been given a reprieve by the Victorian state government. The government intervened to stop a high-rise development next to the station's East Brunswick headquarters.
The development threatened to block the station's signal from reaching a transmitter on Mount Dandenong. Planning Minister Richard Wynne set up an independent panel to adjudicate. The panel agreed that it was too expensive for Triple R to move its radio mast and recommended a smaller building.
Three separate domestic violence deaths just days apart in south-east Queensland have prompted Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk to fast-track the implementation of the recommendations of the Special Taskforce on Domestic and Family Violence.
The deaths of a child and two women between September 7 and 10 occurred less than a month after the government published its response to the Task Force’s report, Not now, not ever: Putting an end to domestic and family violence in Queensland.
How to get active
ARMIDALE
Join Women in Black in a silent vigil for peace, mourning the victims of violence around the world. Saturday September 26 at 10.30am. Outside the Old Courthouse in the Mall.
BRISBANE
Come to the Sunshine Coast Climate Change Relay. Organised by Sunshine Coast Environment Council. Saturday September 26 at 10.30am Sunshine Beach, 12.15pm Kings Beach, 5.45pm Cotton Tree Park.
MELBOURNE
Few people would have shared tears — unless they happened to be chopping onions at the time — when Tony Abbott was ejected as prime minister in the latest of a string of Lib-Lab leadership spills.
Let's be honest. The rolling TV coverage of Malcolm Turnbull's political assassination of Abbott kept the nation entertained for a couple of hours on a Monday night. Who did not enjoy watching the grim faces of those Liberal MPs as they trooped into their party room for the spill, and the even grimmer faces of some as they came back out?
The NSW government owns about 277,400 properties. Their combined commercial worth, according to finance minister Dominic Perrottet is $60 billion.
Most of the property is commercial, built up over many decades by successive Labor and Coalition governments, and financed by NSW taxpayers, on behalf of whom the present NSW government holds them in trust.
But the Mike Baird government doesn’t get this “holding in trust” thing. They believe the assets are theirs to sell; and this is precisely what Perrottet intends to do.
Somewhere wandering aimlessly through the hard streets of Sydney's North Shore, is a dishevelled man in a crumpled suit and a few days’ growth telling concerned passers-by, “I'm not crying, it's just the onion” as he bites into his umpteenth bulb since Monday night, eyes red and flakes of onion skin around his mouth and down his front.
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