Growing Pains: The Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network at Seven Years

The mission of the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN), as stated in its Constitution, is ‘to advance the rights of refugees and other people in need of protection in the Asia Pacific region’. This article describes and analyses APRRN’s internal governance and resourcing and the manner in which it is going about achieving its mission. It argues that APRRN’s organisational strength is inadequate to support all that it is trying to do. The article concludes by considering what APRRN could do to improve the likelihood of achieving success in the pursuit of its mission and reflecting on the lessons of the APRRN case study for wider civil society

Australia and Stateless Palestinians

This article considers Australia’s treatment of stateless Palestinian asylum seekers and discusses whether that treatment discharges Australia’s legal and/or moral obligations towards the individuals in question. The conclusion drawn is that it does not.L’article prend en considération le traitement que l’Australie réserve aux demandeurs d’asile palestiniens apatrides et demande si ce traitement décharge l’Australie de ses obligations juridiques et/ou morales envers les individus en question. La conclusion établit qu’il n’en est rien

Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples

Funder: NCI U24CA211006Abstract: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) curated consensus somatic mutation calls using whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), respectively. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumour types, we compare WES and WGS side-by-side from 746 TCGA samples, finding that ~80% of mutations overlap in covered exonic regions. We estimate that low variant allele fraction (VAF < 15%) and clonal heterogeneity contribute up to 68% of private WGS mutations and 71% of private WES mutations. We observe that ~30% of private WGS mutations trace to mutations identified by a single variant caller in WES consensus efforts. WGS captures both ~50% more variation in exonic regions and un-observed mutations in loci with variable GC-content. Together, our analysis highlights technological divergences between two reproducible somatic variant detection efforts

Seeking an alternative to life in limbo

It\u27s hardly surprising that some refugees and asylum seekers try to continue on to Australia, writes Savitri Taylor ON 30 SEPTEMBER last year the Australian Navy intercepted a boat off the coast of Western Australia and took the twelve Middle-Eastern asylum seekers on board to Christmas Island. These individuals who had made their way from Indonesia were the first unauthorised boat arrivals of the Rudd government era. Since then several more boats carrying mostly Middle-Eastern asylum seekers have made the same trip. I use the term “asylum seeker” advisedly because all the arrivals to date appear to have made protection claims. What is more, all the protection claim decisions of which I am aware have been positive. In other words, the claimants have been recognised as refugees and granted permanent protection visas. The federal opposition is arguing that the abolition of temporary protection visas and the softening of immigration detention policy have encouraged a renewal of people smuggling through Indonesia to Australia and that the government is, therefore, to blame for the present spate of unauthorised boat arrivals. There may be a small element of truth to this, but I tend to agree with the government’s assessment that the recent upsurge in irregular asylum seeker movement is part of a worldwide phenomenon largely explicable by reference to events in source countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Sri Lanka. Unfortunately, the one point on which government and the opposition are in rhetorical agreement is that Australia needs to keep intensifying its efforts to strengthen border control and disrupt people smuggling until the boats stop coming... Read the full article on our partner website, Inside Story &gt; Photo: An unauthorised boat with ten asylum seekers intercepted off the West Australian coast on 19 November 2008. The skipper of the vessel, Indonesian man Man Pombili, was sentenced to six years in jail in the District Court in Perth on 17 April. (Office of the Prime Minister

The asylum freeze and international law

It’s likely that last week’s decision is based on an overly optimistic assessment of conditions in source countries, writes Savitri Taylor in Inside Story ON 9 APRIL the immigration minister, Chris Evans, and his colleagues Stephen Smith and Brendan O’Connor issued a joint media release announcing “Changes to Australia’s Immigration Processing System.” The takeaway message came in the very first sentence: “Effective immediately, the Australian government has today introduced a suspension of the processing of new asylum applications from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.” Following this statement came 2144 words (yes, I counted) of elaboration and justification, and since the announcement thousands more words have been written by way of commentary. Many lawyers have questioned whether the suspension is consistent with domestic law as it stands and have raised the possibility of a legal challenge. But Julian Burnside cut to the heart of the matter when he pointed out that, in the domestic sphere, the passage of legislation is all that is required to provide a sound legal basis for implementation of the new policy. There is no doubt that any necessary validating legislation would get the support of the Coalition in the Senate and would therefore pass. The question I wish to consider here is whether the government’s new policy is internationally lawful. This is quite distinct from the question of domestic lawfulness because it is a principle of customary international law that a state cannot defend a claim that it has breached its international legal obligations by saying that its conduct was permitted or even mandated under its domestic law. And in order to assess international lawfulness we need to drill down into the details of the policy and its justification... Read the full articl

Between the devil and the deep blue sea

The weekend’s boat tragedy makes the need for regional cooperation more urgent than ever, writes Savitri Taylor in Inside Story. The good news is that real progress has already been made • DESPITE the ordeal after their boat sank off the coast of Java on Saturday, some of the surviving asylum seekers have told journalists that they will board another boat – most likely just as overcrowded and unseaworthy as the one that sank – and try again to reach Australia. Why would they take this kind of risk yet again? Between 2007 and 2009, Sandra Gifford and I led a research project that included interviews with asylum seekers and refugees living in Indonesia, the last country of departure for most people arriving here by boat. We discovered that asylum seekers and refugees don’t necessarily want to make Australia their home. They just want to have a home: a place where they can live in safety, support themselves with dignity, give their children a future through education, and belong. The knowledge that they had a realistic prospect of being resettled in a country that could fulfil these needs would have been enough to enable them to bear short-term insecurity. In fact, if these basic human needs could be fulfilled in Indonesia, they would have been happy to settle there. Unfortunately, neither a home in its true meaning nor the hope of one in the future can be found in Indonesia, or in most other countries in our region. Australia is one of the few exceptions to that rule… Read the full article &nbsp

Applications close: 24 August 2007

12 month part-time (0.5) research assistant position - La Trobe University Bundoora Campus. The research assistant will assist in the conduct of the ARC Linkage Grant project entitled \u27The impact on the human rights of asylum-seekers and host communities of Australia\u27s border control cooperation with Indonesia and PNG\u27