On March 14, Huang Hao, a Chinese detainee at the Villawood detention centre, attempted suicide by swallowing four razor blades.
Sarah Stephen
When Kuwaiti-born Palestinian refugee Aladdin Sisalem arrived in Melbourne on May 31, 2004, greeted by the glare of television cameras and the welcome of supporters, his emotions were tinged with a sense of triumph and relief.
Since the end of July, 24-year-old Palestinian asylum seeker Aladdin Sisalem has been the only prisoner in the Australian government's Lombrum detention centre on Manus Island, in Papua New Guinea. He has very little human contact,
The Australian-funded detention centre on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island first opened on October 21, 2001. The first group of Iraqi asylum seekers to arrive there were dismayed to find they had been tricked into thinking they were being taken to Australia.
A surprise tax cut in this year's federal budget, released on May 13, saw the corporate media happily seize on one of the least significant elements of the Howard government's eighth budget. The question the media should have been
Fatima is a widow and grandmother who has been in Australia for 10 years, living with her family who are financially supporting her. She has no remaining close family in East Timor and has grown very close to her grandchildren here.
An interim ruling by New Zealand's High Court has found that the Labour-Alliance coalition government's policy of routinely detaining asylum seekers who arrive without authorisation is in violation of the United Nations refugee convention.
Last September, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark announced that the Labour-Alliance coalition government she leads would be willing to take a small number of the 430 refugees aboard the MV Tampa, which was then stranded in seas off Christmas Island by the Australian government's refusal to let it dock.
In early February there was a flurry of media coverage about 25-year-old Palestinian Aladdin Sisalem — the lone asylum seeker detained in the Australian-financed Manus Island detention centre. It was revealed by the February 11