Asylum seekers are currently being moved off Manus Island, but only as far as Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, and not to Australia. They are still stateless, with their refugee claims still being ‘processed’, and still without a safe place to call home. They do not know what their future holds.

You may be interested in reading this link to a recent book review of Behrouz Boochani’s ‘No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison’ (Anansi) - The true story of an illegally imprisoned refugee (Picador), by Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee in The New York Review of Books, which is also a powerful essay in its own right, and which explains eruditely and in detail the background and the history of migration to Australia, and which gives a detailed critique of the Australian policy of offshore processing of refugees.

Until the refugees and asylum seekers have been given the choice of a permanent, safe and welcoming home, they are forced to continue to exist in limbo, still stateless, still offshore, and still unable to move forward with their lives. Still waiting, indefinitely, to be welcomed to a safe country in which they can build a future and have a permanent home.

Please continue to support this petition by sharing it with your friends, family and work colleagues, and anyone you feel would be interested in this urgent humanitarian issue.

Thank you.