ERC Just Comment Vol 15 No 2: Austerity - 'Trickle-down cruelty'

As several countries try to pay off huge public debt due to the financial crisis and apply spending cuts - voices of caution say this is ‘a dangerous idea’ because this response indicates there is one set of rules for rich countries and another for poor countries. 

The financial ship has been taken into dangerous waters by those at the top and they do not suffer from austerity budgets. We need to listen to those who have suffered from these budgets: children who only get one chance at an education; the sick and disabled unable to support themselves; and seniors too old to work. 

This war on the majority of people intensifies as the global business class’ call for austerity ‘hides processes of the uneven distribution of risk and vulnerability.’ 

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ERC Media: Afghanistan research uncovers grave dangers for deportees from Australia - 4th April 2012

MEDIA RELEASE -- Sydney, Wednesday, 4th April 2012
Research in Afghanistan uncovers grave dangers faced by deportees from Australia

Deportations research just conducted in Afghanistan by the respected Australian social justice organisation, Edmund Rice Centre, has revealed further horrors confronted by asylum seekers who have been returned there by the Australian Government.

“In this visit to Kabul, further to our previous visits, we met and interviewed another 31 returned asylum seekers. 29 of these 31 are living in extreme danger,” affirmed ERC Director, Phil Glendenning. “We confirmed the deaths of another two returnees and the kidnapping of one other who is now presumed dead.”

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ERC Media: Another asylum seeker death in 'detention' -- 28 Feb 2012

“The Edmund Rice Centre is distressed to learn of another asylum seeker death in ‘detention’,” John Sweeney, the Centre’s coordinator of research, affirmed today. 

“In the early hours of Monday morning ‘Ali’, an asylum seeker from Iran, died in Liverpool Hospital. Medical advice suggests to us that the ongoing stress was very probably the most significant factor causing his death. Ali had committed no crime. It was cruel, it was inhuman and degrading.”

“The Department had very good evidence that detaining Ali was causing him serious harm and yet refused to respond to protect those fundamental rights. He had no right to appeal whether his detention complied with Human Rights Law before a court.”

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ERC Indigenous Immersion: Brothers and Others 2012

Brothers and Others - working in partnership with Indigenous communities.

- Come walk with us and celebrate Reconciliation Week in a different way.

You are invited to participate in the Let’s Talk: Brothers and Others 2012 Immersion Program, 26th May – 2nd June, 2012.

Let’s Talk: Brothers and Others had a highly successful pilot Immersion program in 2011. The Brothers and Others program began as a invitation for Brothers and people in the Edmund Rice Networks’ to walk with Indigenous peoples in North West NSW on a journey in their country.

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Just Comment Vol 15 No 1: Famine - a man-made tragedy

Every five seconds, a child under 10 dies of hunger. Thirty-five million people die each year from hunger or its immediate aftermath. One billion people are permanently and severely malnourished and the situation is becoming increasingly catastrophic.

Hunger is not a natural but a man-made tragedy. People do not go hungry because there is not enough food to eat, but because the system that delivers food from the fields to our plates is broken. Rising global food prices and increasing food insecurity, which affect the poor disproportionately, is seen as a business opportunity by the agribusiness industry. Whilst drought is largely a natural phenomenon, famine is political and avoidable.

In a time where we are becoming increasingly desensitised to largescale, deepening tragedy, this is a Just Comment that brings famine and our role back to the fore. As Desmond Tutu says, 'world hunger is man-made and only we can end it'.

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ERC International Human Rights Immersion: Central America -- July 2012

A formation program for people wishing to develop new and profound perspectives to their existing frameworks and commitment to social justice & reconciliation. The program will emphasise the use of a rights-based approach in development work and in systemic advocacy for social justice.  
  
The immersion aims to foster engagement with the international partner organisations visited, and to bring about transformational education for justice. International immersion experiences develop a new and internalised sense of our world, and of structures of inequity within it, from the perspectives of the economically excluded.    
   
El Salvador & Guatemala: Within processes of post -conflict social reconciliation, few places provide better examples of the use of programs of ‘recovery of historic memory’ as human rights strategies to confront structural impunity and to build social justice.  In our visit to the region we will meet with people who have risked all in the struggle for social justice in these countries. These are people who continue to be willing to put their lives on the line for the construction of a better society.

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ERC Media: Asylum boat tragedy: End politicking & double our intake -- 19 Dec 2011

The Edmund Rice Centre director, Phil Glendenning, today expressed his deep sorrow at news of the weekend asylum boat disaster. “This event is an utter tragedy,” he said. “We offer heart-felt condolences to the families of all those who have perished.”

“First, Australia should double our annual national humanitarian migration intake - with the increase taking the form of a major program of settlement of refugees from within our own region. Such an initiative would remove the incentive for people of jumping on a boat and risking their lives.”

“Second, our politicians have got to stop playing partisan politics with this issue. The level of leadership displayed by both major political parties on this issue has been simply appalling.”

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ERC Media Release: Open Statement on Asylum Seekers -- Prominent Australians -- Sunday, 9th October 2011

A group of prominent Australian individuals and institutions, has signed an Open Statement on Asylum Seekers .

The Statement calls on the Prime-Minister and the Leader of the Opposition to abandon their separate plans for off-shore processing of asylum claims in favour of humanitarian policies similar to those enacted with bi-partisan support in the aftermath of the Vietnam War during the 1970's.

Signatories include former Prime-Minister Malcolm Fraser; eminent jurist Elizabeth Evatt; former Minister of Immigration in the Fraser Government, Ian Macphee; 2010 Australian of the Year Professor Patrick McGorry; 2011 Senior Australian of the Year Professor Ron McCallum; child psychiatry expert Professor Louise Newman; together with other leading academics, and human rights and legal experts.

National institutional signatories of the Statement include the Refugee Council, the Council for International Development, the Catholic and Uniting Churches, and the international development agency of the National Council of Churches.

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Just Comment Vol 14 No 3: Riots - the Language of the Unheard

In the scramble to comprehend London’s August riots, almost every commentator opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence.

There was no doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. But it just seemed too easy to dismiss it all as mindless and needless, opportunistic theft and violence, ‘pure criminality’, or the work of a ‘violent minority’.

A reasonably objective view of Britain’s political landscape and the civil unrest witnessed in Britain would suggest that the responsibility lay exactly where it always has since the beginning of ‘civilisation’: the leaders responsible for the society they have helped to create.

It is no coincidence that this violence in London takes place against the backdrop of a global economy poised for free fall. John Kenneth Galbraith has set out the causes of recession: bad income distribution, a business sector engaged in ‘corporate larceny’, a weak banking structure and an import/export imbalance. With no jobs and no sense of a future – a human catastrophe was waiting to happen!

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ERC Media: “Nauru & PNG invalid”: legal opinion to ERC -- 5th Sept 2011

In response to last week's decision from the High Court, to disallow the deportation of asylum seekers to Malaysia, the Edmund Rice Centre sought expert legal opinion as to the effect of the ruling on possible deportations under Section 198A of the Migration Act to Nauru or to Papua New Guinea.

ERC Media: High Court decision an opportunity for new asylum paradigm -- 1st Sep 2011

“The High Court ruling on deportations to Malaysia, should serve as call to reflection by the major parties to forge a new policy framework – focussed on compassion, empathy and respect for the human dignity of the vulnerable,” said Edmund Rice Centre director, Phil Glendenning.  

“The Edmund Rice Centre calls on the major political parties to respect the full significance of the Court's ruling by moving away from the bipartisan commitment to 'deterrence', in favour of a new paradigm through which Australia can recognise the vulnerability of arriving asylum-seekers, and offer them a humanitarian and just response,” he said.

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ERC Fact-sheet: 10 Essential Facts About Asylum Seekers

Over the past 10 years, advances have only been made in improving Australia's treatment of asylum seekers, once a critical mass is achieved of people with adequate command of the facts.

To this end the Edmund Rice Centre has a strong history of investing in the process of community education on many levels. An important part of this has been the publication of factsheets such as the widely distributed series Debunking the Myths on Asylum Seekers . 

In the current stage of the ongoing national debate on asylum policy ERC has produced another important factsheet: 10 Essential Facts About Asylum Seekers .

You can assist our efforts to achieve this much needed critical mass by downloading a copy of this fact-sheet and emailing it on to family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Already we have heard from some people who have made photocopies to distribute through local churches, schools, universities and community groups.

Download page

Pacific Calling Partnership at UN Climate Summit

PCP at Cancun COP16 in Mexico Dec 2010

Click here to watch our 5min video on YouTube

A Well-Founded Fear -- Nationally televised documentary on Asylum Seekers

www.erc.org.au/deport/petition

www.erc.org.au/donate

ERC Submission: Violence against Women and Children

The Federal government is developing a National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and Children. Lilla: International Women's Network, initiated by the Edmund Rice Centre (ERC) has made a submission to inform the development of this National Plan.

In this submission, Lilla argues that grass-roots women's initiatives are the fundamental building blocks of any effective, sustainable and long-term effort to eliminate violence against women. Lilla urges the National Council overseeing the developement of this new National Plan to adopt as a key over-arching strategy: the empowerment of women from victims of violence to agents of social change.

The full submission can be read here.

ERC Submission: Immigration Detention

The Edmund Rice Centre has made a submission to the Federal Parliament's Inquiry into Immigration Detention. The Inquiry which was called in June by Senator Evans, the Minster for Immigration is being conducted by Parliament's Joint Standing Committee on Migration.

ERC submits that:
• Australian reception of asylum seekers should embrace a continuum of measures ordinarily based on well-supported accommodation with communities which may, in extreme circumstances, include detention.
• Any decisions concerning which measure to apply in particular cases should only be applied after proper judicial review according to the principles of proportionality and necessity consonant with Human Rights Law.
• Wide community involvement and engagement with Government is the best way to fulfil Australia's commitments under the Convention.

The full submission can be read here