A 104-year-old Chinese woman could live out her days behind razor wires in a notorious Austra-lian immigration detention center, her attorney said yesterday.
The Immigration Department has denied a visa to Hu Cuiyu, who came to Australia on a 12-month visitors visa in 1995 to see her adopted daughter Motoko Otani. Airlines denied her a ticket to return to her home in Xinjiang Province on the grounds that she was too old and frail for the rigors of airline travel.
Lawyer Julian Burnside said that after being declared an unlawful non-citizen, Hu could be taken into custody.
"If the department refused to issue her with a visa of any sort and it was not physically possible to take her out of the country, then presumably, the department would put her in a detention center and keep her there for the rest of her life," the prominent civil rights lawyer said.
Family friend Shep Chow told Australia's AAP news agency that Hu had adopted Otani during the Japanese occupation when she was a three-year-old orphan.
"She has got no children of her own, and her contemporaries and friends have all passed on, and the only family she has are in Australia," Chow said.
The case is another embarrassment for the Immigration Department, which revealed earlier this month that it had held a schizophrenic German woman in detention for 10 months, believing she was an asylum seeker.
Permanent resident Cornelia Rau, an air steward with the national airline Qantas until 2000, had lived in Australia for all but four of her 39 years and was listed as a missing person.
The Burmese junta has said that detained former leader Aung San Suu Kyi is “in good health,” a day after her son said he has received little information about the 80-year-old’s condition and fears she could die without him knowing. In an interview in Tokyo earlier this week, Kim Aris said he had not heard from his mother in years and believes she is being held incommunicado in the capital, Naypyidaw. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was detained after a 2021 military coup that ousted her elected civilian government and sparked a civil war. She is serving a
REVENGE: Trump said he had the support of the Syrian government for the strikes, which took place in response to an Islamic State attack on US soldiers last week The US launched large-scale airstrikes on more than 70 targets across Syria, the Pentagon said on Friday, fulfilling US President Donald Trump’s vow to strike back after the killing of two US soldiers. “This is not the beginning of a war — it is a declaration of vengeance,” US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote on social media. “Today, we hunted and we killed our enemies. Lots of them. And we will continue.” The US Central Command said that fighter jets, attack helicopters and artillery targeted ISIS infrastructure and weapon sites. “All terrorists who are evil enough to attack Americans are hereby warned
Seven wild Asiatic elephants were killed and a calf was injured when a high-speed passenger train collided with a herd crossing the tracks in India’s northeastern state of Assam early yesterday, local authorities said. The train driver spotted the herd of about 100 elephants and used the emergency brakes, but the train still hit some of the animals, Indian Railways spokesman Kapinjal Kishore Sharma told reporters. Five train coaches and the engine derailed following the impact, but there were no human casualties, Sharma said. Veterinarians carried out autopsies on the dead elephants, which were to be buried later in the day. The accident site
‘NO AMNESTY’: Tens of thousands of people joined the rally against a bill that would slash the former president’s prison term; President Lula has said he would veto the bill Tens of thousands of Brazilians on Sunday demonstrated against a bill that advanced in Congress this week that would reduce the time former president Jair Bolsonaro spends behind bars following his sentence of more than 27 years for attempting a coup. Protests took place in the capital, Brasilia, and in other major cities across the nation, including Sao Paulo, Florianopolis, Salvador and Recife. On Copacabana’s boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro, crowds composed of left-wing voters chanted “No amnesty” and “Out with Hugo Motta,” a reference to the speaker of the lower house, which approved the bill on Wednesday last week. It is
RSS