The opposition coalition pledged yesterday to pay other countries to take asylum seekers off Australia’s hands if it wins elections this year in a policy aimed at deterring further arrivals.
Opposition leader Tony Abbott made Australia’s response to a burgeoning number of asylum seekers traveling to Australia by boat an election issue by launching his conservative coalition’s new policy. An election date has yet to set.
Its centerpiece is a revival of the so-called “Pacific Solution,” in which Australia paid impoverished island neighbors Nauru and Papua New Guinea to keep asylum seekers in detention centers.
The message to asylum seekers was that they would never set foot on the Australian mainland, but many were eventually settled in Australia after sometimes spending years in offshore camps.
Human rights groups attacked the policy as punitive when the previous coalition government introduced it in 2001, months ahead of an election.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd scrapped the policy when his center-left Labor Party won control of the government in 2007, but he continues to keep most boat arrivals in a crowded camp on the remote Australian Indian Ocean territory of Christmas Island while the refugees claims are assessed.
Abbott has blamed the government’s softening of Australia’s asylum seeker stance for more than 4,000 people arriving by boat in the past year, many of them Afghans and Sri Lankans who paid Indonesian people-smugglers to ship them to Australia.
“I am a big risk to people smugglers,” Abbott told reporters. “If I get elected, people smugglers will go out of business.”
Rudd attempted to slow the flow earlier this year by imposing a three-month freeze on processing asylum claims from Sri Lankans and Afghans — a development condemned yesterday in the annual report of London-based human rights organization Amnesty International.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
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