The Stateless Rohingya Blog

GENEVA  (Reuters) - The head of U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said on Friday he hopes common sense will prevail in Australia's election-season debate about how the country treats asylum seekers. "We are of course very much interested, not in the election itself, but in the debate about asylum policy in Australia," said U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres. Opinion polls predict the government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's Labor Party will be unseated by the conservative coalition led by Tony Abbot when Australians vote on September 7. In a pitch to voters concerned about immigration, Abbott promised last week to revive tough laws barring thousands of asylum seekers already in Australia from settling there permanently. "The debate about these questions, not only in Australia but in many other parts of the world, is unfortunately not always based only on realities. It's based on perceptions, on prejudice, on other aspects," Guterr...

GENEVA -- It's shaping up to be a lost generation: The number of child refugees fleeing Syria's violence has now topped the 1 million mark. The grim milestone announced Friday by U.N. officials means as many Syrian children have been uprooted from their homes or families as the number of children who live in Wales, or in Boston and Los Angeles combined, said Antonio Guterres, the head of the Office for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. "Can you imagine Wales without children? Can you imagine Boston and Los Angeles without children?" Guterres told reporters in Geneva. Roughly half of all the nearly 2 million registered refugees from Syria are children and 740,000 of those are under the age of 11, according to the U.N. refugee and children's agencies. Guterres said the horrors of war experienced by these children puts them in grave danger of becoming a "lost generation." With emotion he recounted some of his personal visits with Syrian ...

UN News Villawood Immigration Detention Centre outside Sydney, Australia. Photo: IRIN  Australia’s arbitrary and indefinite detention of 46 refugees amounts to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” the United Nations Human Rights Committee has  said , calling for their immediate release. The refugees, who have been held in detention for at least two and half years, had been recognized as asylum-seekers who could not return to their homes. However, the Australian Government refused to grant them visas on the grounds that they posed a security risk. The 46 refugees – 42 Tamils from Sri Lanka, three Rohingya from Myanmar and a Kuwaiti –were not told the reasons of why they were considered a security risk, and so could not mount a legal challenge to their indefinite detention. “The combination of the arbitrary character of (their) detention, its protracted and/or indefinite duration, the refusal to provide information and procedural rights to (them) and the difficu...

The navy intercepts a boat full of asylum seekers: Australia has been found guilty of violating the human rights of 46 refugees.  Photo: Sharon Tisdale Australia has been found guilty of almost 150 violations of international law over the indefinite detention of 46 refugees in one of the most damning assessments of human rights in this country by a United Nations committee. The federal government has been ordered to release the refugees, who have been in detention for more than four years, "under individually appropriate conditions" and to provide them with rehabilitation and compensation. Consistent with Australia's treaty obligations, the government has been given 180 days to assure the committee that it has acted on the recommendations and taken steps to prevent "similar violations in future". The UN's Human Rights Committee concluded that the continued detention of the refugees, most of them Sri Lankan Tamils, is "cumulati...

Rohingyas intercepted on the Thai coast are sent to the crowded Phan Nga immigration detention centre. The Nation: August 23, 2013 The government should end the inhumane separation and detention of ethnic Rohingya families from Myanmar and allow them to contribute to the Thai economy For years, thousands of ethnic Rohingya from Myanmar's Arakan State have set sail to flee persecution by the Myanmar government. The situation significantly worsened following sectarian violence in Arakan State in June 2012 between Muslim Rohingya and Buddhist Arakanese, which displaced tens of thousands of Rohingya from their homes.  In October 2012, Arakanese political and religious leaders and state security forces committed crimes against humanity in a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" against the Rohingya.  During the so-called "sailing season" between October 2012 and March 2013, more than 35,000 Rohingya are believed to have fled the country. Internati...

Tomas Ojea Quintana at a press conference prior to his departure from Yangon airport on August 21, 2013 (AFP, Soe Than Win) By AFP August 21, 2013 YANGON — The UN's rights envoy on Myanmar Wednesday slammed the nation's government for failing to protect him when his convoy came under attack in a town reeling from religious unrest. "The state has to protect me as a responsibility... This did not happen. The state failed to protect me," Tomas Ojea Quintan, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights, told reporters at the end of his 10 day visit to the country. No one is thought to have been injured in the incident, which occurred on August 19 in the town of Meiktila, central Myanmar, where anti-Muslim violence in March left at least 44 dead. In a statement the UN envoy said his vehicle "was descended upon by a crowd of around 200 people who proceeded to punch and kick the windows and doors of the car while shouting abuse". ...

AFP / South Asia August 20, 2013 Myanmar has strongly denied previous accusations of ethnic cleansing A Rohingya girl stands near the Bawdupa IDP camps outside of Sittwe August 11, 2013.  Photo- Reuters Myanmar must address anti-Muslim propaganda and stamp out a culture of impunity for religious violence or risk “catastrophic” levels of conflict, a rights group warned Tuesday. Physicians for Human Rights described attacks on Muslims, that have swept the country since fighting first broke out last year as “widespread and systematic,” in a report examining unrest that has killed around 250 people and left tens of thousands homeless. The US-based group said that while the situation in the country currently appeared calm, a failure to properly investigate and deal with the causes of the tensions risks further clashes. PHR reported that “the brazen nature of these crimes and the widespread culture of impunity in which these massacres occur form deeply tr...