Essay on asylum seekers

Submitted By shenestephens
Words: 859
Pages: 4

In today’s society we are safe; we can go outside and not have any worries about our safety. In Australia we have the freedom of speech; we have the right to elect our Prime Ministers. And we are very fortunate that we live in Australia and yet we all seem to take it for granted, is that because we are naive or just stupid? We Australians are a multicultural, we have different types of races in different suburbs in different cities, and yet we act like we all share the same views and values. Let me tell you a story. A family from Afghanistan ran a secret school for Children both male and female, which is illegal in Afghanistan for females to have the right of an education. They we found out and the parents of this family were sentenced to execution, they ran, tried to buy passage with what little money they had, and not all of them made it, their daughters being taken raped and murdered. There whole family were seeking asylum, and yet they had to go through all that hard ache, we a Great nation need to step up our effects in helping those that need it most, Asylum Seekers. Asylum Seekers have such a bad name in today’s society, strange that. In the early 18 hundreds didn’t English people travel vast oceans on boats to seek refuge in Australia? Hmmm. Strange that 200 years later people from across the globe, are doing the same thing BUT we are locking them up in refugee camps. Isn’t there something wrong about that? The Aboriginals, natives of Australian never locked up the English Settlers or even the convicts, they might have had their ups and downs but they never imprisoned over 2000 people.

The term "human rights" refers to the basic freedoms and protections that all people are entitled to, simply for being human. Today, Australia faces the challenge of Asylum seekers, many of whom which have currently been denied their basic human rights. The government’s policy of creating Immigration Detention Facilities as a way of detaining unauthorised asylum seekers may be a solution the problem of controlling Australia’s borders, however, violates the human rights of this group in Australia.. Many people seek refuge in Australia to escape the terrors of their past lives back home.
Due to Australia’s strict visa policy, many asylum seekers arrive in Australia by boat because they are denied other means of entry, such as the closing down of other possibilities for legal travel. This has led to an increase in the number of asylum-seeker boats coming to Australia over the past year, with the number of people held in immigration detention reaching record highs.
The policy was put in place to act as a deterrent to future undocumented arrivals, which clearly has not been working as in the past year, the number of people held in detention centres increased to 12 967. Immigration detention centres differ little from prisons, with conditions such as no psychiatrists, community and support groups allowed no access, lack of interpreters and extreme isolation. This can lead to long term effects on already traumatised people, not to mention the substantial economic costs involved.

In Australia, public debate about asylum seekers and refugees right has been distorted by myths and misconceptions. Current government policy is shaped by around border…