What to make of this phrase in Article 31 of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 'refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened', in light of the fact that pretty much every asylum seeker who arrives in Australia by boat has travelled through many territories where they could have sought asylum, on the way?

Agree....these wretches seem to circumnavigate every country on the planet (specially the muslim ones that might make em work for a living) till they see Oz..then their boats seem strangely to fall apart and they need rescuing by the Navy

Deary me, here we go again.

The UN 1951 convention is 60 years out of date. Today it's
being largely misused and abused by economic migrants who want
the cushy western lifestyle. Not just here, but in Europe and
elsewhere.

Perhaps its time for the UN to do a bit of navel gazing and
update the convention so that resources are best spent on genuine
refugees living in refugee camps, not the flood of economic refugees
as we have now.

At the end of the day, our abiding by the convention is purely
voluntary. We are doing more then our share. The fact remains,
Australia cannot solve the world's problems. At the moment,
the generosity of our taxpayers to fund all this, is being misused.
Tax resources are hardly being spent wisely.

Wait, so Australia's laws DO in fact state that we are within our rights and responsibility to bar anauthorized people entry and detain them, but this, despite being an actual law, must be trumped by a non-enforceable declaration signed 60 years ago by someone who did not even have a majority to do so on our behalf and when world issues were unlike today?

Sadly the rest of this article wallows in superficial statements and ignores virtually every point detractors would make, such as Yabby's point about crossing multiple countries- which logically disrupts the 'need' to actually settle in Australia at all to 'escape';

The bottom line of this article is "The UN says so, so it is right and you are wrong, full stop". And it strikes me that a lot of people who disagree with preventing refugees entry find (pseudo)-contract red-tape as a convenient excuse to hide behind.

The only thing this article achieved is to clarify that Australian law DOES, in fact, allow this practice.

Asylum is one thing; occupation and usurpation is a tottaly different thing.
Dont confuse the two.
Asylum was never meant to be permanent. It means "shelter" from something. When the cause of the need to seek asylum has ended it is time to return to where the asylum seekers came from.
Does that make sense to you? Are we agreed so far ?

What this lot do is in fact no sooner have they landed in Australia they want citizenship. Does this look like they believe that "asylum" means temporary protection?

socratease

All you've done Rose is to underline again why Australia MUST either:

Add exception provisions to our signatory status

and/or

REMOVE out signatory status from the convention which is being used by Socialists to undermine our sovereignty and independance.

So..as for 'international law' and our 'obligations' ? ? ?

WHO voted for those 'obligations' ? I sure as heck did NOT.