On 10th September, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) issued a media release stating that 34 school-aged children currently detained in Darwin would begin attending classes the following Monday after the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between itself and the Northern Territory Department of Education and Training. The NT News picked up
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When Professor Louise Newman took the unprecedented step of speaking out plainly on Lateline last week about the impending mental health crisis in Immigration detention centres, the reaction was zero. As the antipathy towards asylum seekers grows, carefully nurtured through successive elections by our politicians, Australia is reaching a position which allows any cruelty and
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If the Scherger Air Base becomes an Immigration Detention Centre (IDC), the people most likely to be locked up there are Hazara people from Afghanistan. Hazaras are a minority group in Afghanistan who have been persecuted for centuries but more recently this has degenerated to a form of genocide under the Taliban. Hazaras are readily
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There are around 150 boys aged 14 to 17 currently locked up in the Darwin Airport Motel who have not left the building since April. These boys are almost all Hazaras, a persecuted minority who are being killed and driven out of Afghanistan by the Taliban. Many of these boys have seen their fathers and
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The Australian government maintains that it does not detain children in immigration detention centres (IDCs). Instead, children are detained in Alternative Places of Detention (APODs) which can be motels or mining camps which SERCO, a global security company, runs. The Asti Motel in Darwin is one such APOD, as are the Leonora Mining Camp, two
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