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The global COVID-19 pandemic has seen unprecedented state border closures and a proliferation of novel restrictions on human mobility both within and between states. This article examines the human rights implications for refugees and asylum seekers of one COVID-19 response measure within and beyond Australia: namely, the adoption of COVID-19 vaccination passport systems. We argue that the use of COVID-19 passport systems in 2021 intensified and entrenched the growing inequalities between states and people in the vaccine-rich Global North and vaccine-deprived Global South as well as between citizens and non-citizens within particular states. Using the concepts of ‘mobility injustice’ and ‘immunoprivilege’, we explore how COVID-19 passport systems created particular additional barriers for refugees to access asylum, to exercise their right to mobility and to realise their right to health. We thus call for ongoing vigilance against the potential for COVID-19 passport systems to be redeployed in future times of global pandemics or emergencies to the detriment of refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented people, both in Australia and globally, even while being touted as a means of protecting populations, opening international travel and granting greater freedoms.

Abstract This article examines the gendered harms of state refugee externalisation laws and policies using the case study of Australia’s extraterritorial asylum regime on Nauru. While the regime has been widely criticised, the particular carceral experiences and structural vulnerabilities of refugee women and girls have received limited attention in refugee law scholarship. Drawing on interviews with 10 refugee women, this article documents and conceptualises the abusive nature of the regime from a gender perspective: first in relation to the produced insecurity and sexual violence in immigration detention and temporary resettlement in Nauru; next, in relation to the gendered medicalisation of refugee bodies under the official medical evacuation processes for transferring refugees from Nauru to Australia for healthcare; and finally, in relation to the continued punitive legal limbo and produced deportability for refugee women once transferred to Australia who nonetheless remain subject to the legal exclusions under Australia’s “offshore” detention and processing regime. We argue that, rather than being incidental to its operation, gendered harms have become a defining feature of the structural violence of Australia’s deterrence framework and practices of refugee expulsion and exclusion.

The global COVID-19 pandemic starkly revealed the underlying structural harms and produced vulnerabilities for people living in closed congregate settings like immigration detention centres (‘IDCs’) and residential aged care facilities (‘RACFs’). This article compares the Australian legal regimes that regulate IDCs and RACFs, conceptualising both as authorising and enabling sites of control, confinement and social isolation. We argue that specific COVID-19 measures have intensified a logic of social exclusion and disposability towards people in IDCs and RACFs. Through comparing recent COVID-19 litigation, the article explores the possibilities and limitations of engaging legal strategies to achieve social reform and legal accountability within both sites of confinement. Ultimately, we suggest that such COVID-19 litigation has the greatest possibility of advancing social justice when it is embedded in a broader politics of de-incarceration and abolition oriented towards political inclusion, public health and building more equitable and just communities.

Legal histories of Australia have largely overlooked the exclusion of European émigré lawyers from legal practice in Australia. This article recovers part of this forgotten history by tracing the drawn-out legal admission bids of two Jewish émigré lawyers in the mid-20th century: German-born Rudolf Kahn and Austrian-born Edward Korten. In examining their legal lives and doctrinal legacies, this article demonstrates the changing role and requirement of British subjecthood in the historical constitution and slow cultural transformation of the Australian legal profession. This article suggests that contemporary efforts to promoting cultural diversity in the Australian legal profession are enriched by paying attention to this long and difficult history of legal exclusions.

This chapter trace how “transnational migration law” has come to construct human mobility. It argues that transnational migration law is best conceived of as a useful methodological approach, rather than a distinct area of legal doctrine or spatial domain of law. Conceived as a method, transnational migration law can reveal the juridical assemblage of practices, subjects, and relations for regulating migration. This chapter illuminates some of the core and potentially rival sites, forms, and practices of transnational migration lawmaking, drawing attention to the productive and coercive forces of transnational migration law that have resulted in the maintenance of a “global hierarchy of mobility.” Yet, recognizing that state attempts to monopolize “the legitimate means of movement” are incomplete and contested, the chapter argues that scholars of “transnational migration law” must pay attention to diverse and situated Indigenous legal traditions as sources of authority. In doing so, the chapter critically unpacks the relationship between migration and struggles for decolonization and global justice.

In 2015, the Australian government commissioned a telemovie as part of its strategic communication campaign to deter would-be asylum seekers from travelling to Australia unauthorised by boat. In this article we explore this film as one instance of state practices that seek to control migration at their borders, and a form of state messaging which uses gendered story-telling techniques and characterisations to do so. Officially termed ‘public information campaigns’ (PICs) by states or ‘information strategies’ by international organisations such as the UNHCR, the use of such practices has increased in volume, frequency and prominence in recent years. While there has been some academic attention to PICs, to date, the gendered dimensions of these campaigns have remained largely unexamined. In this article, we argue that a feminist analysis of PICs is critical to understanding both how state borders ‘gender’ refugee subjectivities as well as international law’s authorisation of the violence of state borders more generally. By allocating blame and responsibility on individual refugees and their gendered choices, rather than on state actions and state violence, the film reveals how the institution and policing of state borders simultaneously rest upon gendered imaginaries of refugee responsibilisation and the invisibilisation of state responsibility.

This chapter trace how “transnational migration law” has come to construct human mobility. It argues that “transnational migration law” is best conceived of as a useful methodological approach, rather than a distinct spatial domain of law, that can reveal the juridical assemblage of practices, subjects and relations for regulating migration. This chapter illuminates some of these core contested and potentially rival sites, forms and practices of transnational migration law-making, drawing attention to the productive and coercive forces of transnational migration law that have resulted in the maintenance of a “global hierarchy of mobility”. Yet, recognising that state attempts to monopolise “the legitimate means of movement” are incomplete and contest, the chapter argues that scholars of transnational migration law must pay attention to diverse and situated Indigenous legal traditions as sources of authority. In doing so, the chapter critically unpacks the relationship between migration and struggles for decolonization and global justice.

© The Author(s) 2018. Witchcraft-related violence (WRV), in particular directed towards women and children, has become a source of increasing concern for human rights organizations in the current century. Yet for those fleeing WRV, this heightened attention has not translated across into refugee status. This research examines how claims of WRV were addressed in all available asylum decisions in English, drawn from five jurisdictions. We argue that WRV is a manifestation of gender-related harm; one which exposes major failings in the application of refugee jurisprudence. Inattention to the religious and organizational elements of witchcraft practices, combined with gender insensitivity in analysis, meant that claims were frequently reconfigured by decision makers as personal grudges, or family or community disputes, such that they were not cognizable harms within the terms of the Refugee Convention; or they were simply disbelieved as far-fetched. The success rate of claims was low, compared to available averages, and, when successful, claims were universally accepted on some basis other than the witchcraft element of the case. This article focuses in particular upon cases where the applicant feared harm as an accused witch, while a second related article addresses those fearing persecution from witches or through the medium of witchcraft.

The complexity of refugee determinations cannot be reduced to a soundbite. Legal decisions about refugee status are not an inevitable reflection of the truth or merits of a person’s asylum claims. They are made in the context of a legal system that has been deliberately set up to accelerate asylum decision-making, to deny acces to legal advice to people seeking asylum and to limit the legal options of those who have arrived by boat.