Lacanian Review Online: Walled World

The Security State

Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers has for years been unremittingly brutal. It isn’t because those seeking asylum are criminals, since to seek asylum is not a crime; and it isn’t because those arriving by boat lack grounds for seeking refuge, since over 80% are eventually assessed as being legitimate refugees. The conditions under which the asylum seekers are incarcerated, on the client states of Nauru and Manus Island, are more sadistic than those for even the worst murderers and rapists in Australia. This is the case even when the asylum seekers in question are women, children, the elderly or the disabled.

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