The shifting meaning of persecution in the Australian refugee law: How much must one suffer to be deserving of asylum?

Legislative changes to the meaning of persecution in Australia in the context of refugee law - courts' approach to what constitutes persecution in conflict with Parliament's understanding - level of harm that a person must endure in order to be eligible for refugee status - narrow definition of persecution should be adopted such that only those asylum seekers whose subsistence is imperilled should qualify as refugees.

Refuge in the land of liberty : France and its refugees, from the revolution to the end of asylum, 1787-1939

France has a long tradition of asylum for refugees. Since the Revolution, this has made it the land of liberty (pays de la liberte) and the land of asylum (la terre d'asile)." "In practice, responses have been shaped less by principle than by political and social conditions. Various refugee movements - from the late eighteenth-century Lowlands, to Spanish and Italian liberals in the 1820s, Polish nationalists in the 1830s. German social revolutionaries of 1848-9, anti-Bolsheviks from the Russian Revolution, Christians from the former Ottoman Empire, and Jews from Nazi Germany - have met with mixed responses, which shifted uneasily between sympathy, principle, pragmatism, and open hostility." "This book examines the tensions between refugee rights and political responses to refugees, and between humanitarian concern for their plight and hostility to their imposition on the state. Increasingly punitive measures against refugees saw, in 1939, the end of asylum in the internment of republican exiles from the Spanish Civil War.

Questioning deterrence policies in the mandatory detainment of asylum seekers

This thesis examined Australia's policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers which is based on the theoretical premises that they are rational actors who have choices, and that mandatory detention will serve as a deterrent. Interviews with asylum seekers did not support these underlying assumptions, suggesting that a re-examination of Australia's policies is required. The professional portfolio evaluates the Ward & Hudson (1998) model of the offending child molestation process which is believed to account for the differences in goals, affective states and planning among sexual offenders, and consequently determine an individual's treatment needs. Four case studies are presented and analysed.