Australia in Focus for All the Wrong Reasons: Daily Brief

The saga of world number one tennis player Novak Djokovic has become a jolting reminder of Australia’s abusive treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. While the millionaire athlete spent four nights detained at an immigration hotel in Melbourne before a judge ordered his release, hundreds of refugees and asylum seekers have been held in the country’s immigration detention system for years, suffering severe abuse, inhumane treatment, and medical neglect with limited or no access to legal advice. Twelve people have died in the country’s offshore detention system, among them Omid Masoumali, an Iranian refugee who set himself on fire, and Hamid Kehazaei, another Iranian, who died after a minor infection in his leg became septic, having been denied medical care. Australia’s inhumane policy seems to have encouraged other governments to follow suit. Last year, Denmark authorized the transfer of asylum seekers to offshore locations. In the United Kingdom, the House of Commons passed the “Borders Bill,” purporting to do the same, which the House of Lords is currently examining. 

The death in custody of Iranian writer and poet Baktash Abtin at age 47 exposes the dire conditions Iranian authorities have created for imprisoned critics of the regime. Abtin, imprisoned on abusive national security charges, was put into an induced coma the first week of January when he showed symptoms of a second Covid-19 infection since the beginning of his detention in September 2020. Prison authorities had allegedly delayed transferring him to an outside medical facility despite underlying health issues that Covid-19 could have exacerbated. Abtin is already the second prisoner in Iran to die this year.  

Despite Beijing’s escalating repression in Xinjiang against the region’s 13 million Turkic Muslims, Saudi authorities are apparently preparing to deport two Muslim Uyghurs, who are Turkish residents, back to China. The two had travelled to Saudi Arabia in February 2020 to perform a religious pilgrimage, but have been held arbitrarily since November that year without charge or trial. If returned to China, the Uyghur men face arbitrary detention, torture, or worse. Much of the repression of Uyghurs by Chinese authorities targets their religious practices. Uyghurs are detained and prosecuted for studying the Quran, going on pilgrimages without state approval, wearing religious clothing, and what the authorities have called “abnormal” thoughts or behavior that express “excessive religious fervor.” Deporting the two would tarnish Saudi Arabia’s global human rights image further.  

A court in South Korea’s capital Seoul has rejected a same-sex couple’s bid for spousal health insurance benefits, citing the lack of legislative recognition of same-sex partnerships in South Korea. The ruling underscores the lack of legal protections for same-sex couples in the country. Although opinion polls consistently show strong public support for comprehensive antidiscrimination legislation, South Korean lawmakers have delayed action on legislative protections while continuing to seek a consensus with opponents of LGBT rights thus denying LGBT people many of the same opportunities as others and leaving them highly vulnerable to mistreatment and abuse. 

Zhang Qing, wife of prominent Chinese human rights activist, writer and lawyer Guo Feixiong, passed away yesterday in a hospital in the United States, without having been able to see her husband again. Despite Zhang having been diagnosed with late-stage colon cancer in January last year, Chinese authorities had not only repeatedly prevented her husband from leaving China to care for her but, in a display of inhumane cruelty, forcibly disappeared him in December, rendering his whereabouts unknown. Guo Feixiong, who played a central role defending the rights of villagers against corrupt officials in a landmark rights defense movement case, had been imprisoned twice because of his activism and severely tortured. The authorities’ unrelenting harassment of his family had led his wife to flee to the US with their two young children in 2009. 

As violent pushbacks of asylum seekers at the European Union’s borders continue, the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR has called on the French Presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU), and the Czech Republic which will assume the Presidency in July, to prioritise the better protection of refugees in Europe and globally. “At a time when the number of forcibly displaced people in the world is at an all-time high, when humanitarian needs are increasing, and crucially, when numbers of arrivals to the EU remain manageable, it is essential for the EU to recommit to solidarity”, said Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, the agency’s Representative for EU Affairs. Meanwhile, a number of NGOs have warned that Afghans who fled the Taliban risk dying in freezing temperatures in northern France. People who had had no choice but to flee Afghanistan over land after the US hasty withdrawal last August had arrived in northern France in the hope of reaching the UK by crossing the Channel in dinghies. But a combination of freezing temperatures, increasingly forceful evictions of refugees from makeshift shelters by police and cuts to funding for charities working on the frontline is putting thousands of lives at risk.