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Another man dead at Villawood and the government shrugs

• Settlements must be excluded night and day
• People smuggling is both necessary and inevitable
• Listen to the lessons from Haystack or lives may be lost
• A day at the Villawood detention centre, Australia’s mental trauma ward

Another man dead at Villawood and the government shrugs 19 Sep 2010

Settlements must be excluded night and day 19 Sep 2010 A noble attempt by a nation that actually realises indulging illegal colonies does nothing for peace: The Netherlands on Sunday cancelled a tour of the country by a forum of Israeli mayors because their group included representatives of West Bank settlements. The professional delegation, funded by the Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish-American charity, was supposed to fly to the Netherlands next month to study public policy and local governance. But when the Dutch Foreign Ministry found out that regional council heads from the Judea and Samaria regions – including from the West bank settlements Efrat and Kiryat Arba – were due to participate, they decided to cancel the tour.

People smuggling is both necessary and inevitable 19 Sep 2010 James C. Hathaway, a distinguished visiting professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, writes in Canada’s National Post in defence of human smuggling for refugees. Why? Does this mean that human smuggling is justified? In a way, yes. Canada and other developed countries created the market on which smugglers depend by erecting (literal and virtual) migration walls around their territories. The more difficult it is to get across a border to safety on one’s own, the more sensible it is to hire a smuggler to navigate the barriers to entry. Smugglers are thus the critical bridge to get at-risk people to safety. Which one of us, if confronted with a desperate need to flee but facing seemingly impossible barriers, would not seek out a smuggler to assist us? Canada could avoid its current dilemma by taking the lead on getting governments to agree to a system of refugee responsibility-sharing that would ensure that smugglers are not essential to a refugee’s ability to access real and durable protection. We could then pursue border control without fear of indirectly punishing genuine refugees (not just the smugglers). But if we are not willing to shoulder that political burden, then we should accept that non-exploitative, plain old human smuggling is both inevitable and — sadly — critical to ensuring that immigration rules do not operate so as to keep genuine refugees away. Our migration control system will not be watertight. But with Canada now hosting less than one-half of 1% of the world’s refugees, we are in no position to claim anything remotely approaching hardship, much less the critical threat that the government alleges.

Listen to the lessons from Haystack or lives may be lost 19 Sep 2010 The ongoing scandal over the faulty Haystack web censorship circumvention tool – aka web gurus being far too quick to praise something without proper testing – brings an important statement from Electronic Frontier Foundation: Writing software to protect political activists against censorship and surveillance is a tricky business. If those activists are living under the kind of authoritarian regimes where a loss of privacy may lead to the loss of life or liberty, we need to tread especially cautiously. A great deal of post–mortem analysis is occurring at the moment after the collapse of the Haystack project. Haystack was a censorship-circumvention project that began as a real-time response to Iranian election protests last year. The code received significant levels of media coverage, but never reached the levels of technical maturity and security that are necessary to protect the lives of activists in countries like Iran (or many other places, for that matter). This post isn’t going to get into the debate about the social processes that gave Haystack the kind of attention and deployment that it received, before it had been properly reviewed and tested. Instead, we want to emphasize something else: it remains possible to write software that makes activists living under authoritarian regimes safer. But the developers, funders, and distributors of that software need to remember that it isn’t easy, and need to go about it the right way.

A day at the Villawood detention centre, Australia’s mental trauma ward 19 Sep 2010 I spent today at Sydney’s Villawood detention centre for refugees and met men from Iraq, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. Stories of pain and trauma. All refugees can’t understand why the Australian government keeps them in limbo for months and years deciding on their fate. They fear being returned to Iraq, Afghanistan or Sri Lanka and yet the government says these countries are safe? They’re on crack. Australia should find a humane and fair refugee policy, processing people fast. It really isn’t that hard and maybe the Greens will help.