Former Italian diplomat Filippo Grandi has been appointed as the United Nation’s refugee chief as the organisation wrestles with the worst refugee crisis in history. The 58-year-old diplomat replaces the highly regarded Antonio Guterres, of Portugal, who was United Nations…

Indonesia remains a difficult place for asylum seekers with the incidence of violence against them rising and their official status in limbo. More than a thousand Rohingya asylum seekers in the northern province of Aceh still do not know their…

People from newly emerging culturally and linguistically diverse communities are much more vulnerable to become the victims of miscarriages of justice that the general population, according to eminent lawyer Kimani Boden. “I think definitely people from CALD communities are at…

Thousands of Afghans are fleeing their country as the civil war there gathers steam creating a new exodus of refugees seeking safety. Iran and Pakistan, which house most of the Afghan refugees from previous cycles of violence, have become increasingly…

Migration is shaping the world’s great cities like never before with three million extra people moving to dense urban areas every week, a new report says. And with nearly one in five of the population of the globe’s big cities…

Successive federal governments have been negligent in the debate around multiculturalism giving extremists groups the opportunity to dominate the argument, according to leading sociologist Professor Andrew Jakubowicz. He says the failure in Australia to stop radicalisation is in part due…

A sense of isolation among young people from marginalised Muslim communities is a major cause of radicalisation, according to leading Islamic scholar Professor Greg Barton. Speaking at the 2015 Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (FECCA) conference, in Sydney…

Australia needs to ‘reboot’ the conversation about its refugee and asylum seeker policy in the face of international developments in migration and the tide of refugees sweeping into Europe, according to leading historian Professor Klaus Neumann. Speaking at the 2015…

Racial discrimination is alive and well in Australia forty years after it was officially banned under law, according to Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner Dr Tim Soutphommasane. In a new report released to mark the 40th anniversary of the Racial Discrimination…

Speaking two or more languages regularly can make you smarter, more efficient and better able to learn, according to new research. Researcher Dr Christos Pliatsikas of the University of Kent, in the UK, led a team which looked into the…

On a weekday afternoon in a warehouse in the backstreets of St Kilda a sophisticated logistics operation is underway. There are goods packaged according to use and customer profile, there are stock codes on every item in store and there…

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has announced they will now allow refugees to enter the Rio Games next year. Thomas Bach, President of the IOC, announced the change in rules to the United Nations General Assembly, which adopted a resolution…