Latest news with #Adeang
Scoop
28-04-2025
- Politics
- Scoop
Nauru And Australia Finalise Long-Term Funding For Refugee Processing
Article – RNZ President David Adeang made the announcement in parliament this month, according to the Nauru President David Adeang has announced the conclusion of negotiations with Australia on long-term funding for the Regional Processing Centre. Adeang made the announcement in parliament this month, according to the Nauru Bulletin. To date, 93 transferees reside on Nauru, four of whom have been granted refugee status, while 89 asylum seekers are undergoing the appeals process, according to a report in the fortnightly newsletter published by the Government Information Office. Concerns have long been raised about the treatment of detainees on the island. The Nauru Bulletin said the government implemented a revised Refugee Status Determination (RSD) process and now completes initial refugee assessments within months. The new agreement, which offers multi-year funding, is expected to complete its final approval stages next month.
Scoop
28-04-2025
- Politics
- Scoop
Nauru And Australia Finalise Long-Term Funding For Refugee Processing
Nauru's President David Adeang has announced the conclusion of negotiations with Australia on long-term funding for the Regional Processing Centre. Adeang made the announcement in parliament this month, according to the Nauru Bulletin. To date, 93 transferees reside on Nauru, four of whom have been granted refugee status, while 89 asylum seekers are undergoing the appeals process, according to a report in the fortnightly newsletter published by the Government Information Office. Concerns have long been raised about the treatment of detainees on the island. The Nauru Bulletin said the government implemented a revised Refugee Status Determination (RSD) process and now completes initial refugee assessments within months. The new agreement, which offers multi-year funding, is expected to complete its final approval stages next month.
Gulf Today
24-02-2025
- Business
- Gulf Today
Offering passports to tackle climate change
To help meet the cost of moving about 10,000 residents from low-lying homes menaced by rising sea levels and floods, the remote Pacific Ocean nation of Nauru aims to sell citizenships for the climate-threatened island. President David Adeang is seeking to raise an initial $65 million for work to transform the barren interior — left as an uninhabitable moonscape by decades of phosphate mining — with a project to ultimately develop a new township, farms and workplaces. Around 90% of the population would eventually be relocated under the plan. Foreigners paying at least $140,500 for a passport will likely never step foot on the island nation, which lies around 4,000 kilometers (2,485 miles) northeast of Sydney, though can take advantage of visa-free access to destinations including the UK, Singapore and Hong Kong. 'While the world debates climate action, we must take proactive steps to secure our nation's future,' Adeang, elected in 2023, said in a written response to questions. 'We will not wait for the waves to wash away our homes and infrastructure.' Nauru follows Dominica in aiming to use proceeds from citizenship sales to protect their populations from escalating impacts of climate change. It's an illustration of the challenges small nations face in securing funding to deploy on initiatives to boost resilience. While rich economies have increased the rate of loans and grants to developing countries, the gap between available and required adaptation financing could be as much as $359 billion a year, the United Nations Environment Programme said in a November report. Negotiators for a bloc of small island states, including Nauru, at one point abruptly walked out of tense climate finance talks during last year's COP29 summit in Azerbaijan, and an eventual deal — under which wealthy states pledged to deliver at least $300 billion in annual support for climate action — fell far short of the more than $1 trillion a year that had been sought. Adaptation initiatives 'require substantial financial resources which is an ongoing struggle,' Adeang told the UN General Assembly in New York last September. 'When it comes to climate finance, we are too often relegated to the back of the queue.' Between 2008 and 2022, Nauru received $64 million in development financing that had a principal focus on addressing climate change, according to the Lowy Institute, a foreign affairs think tank. Nauru faces significant increases in extreme flooding in the coming decades, according to NASA's Sea Level Change Team. The number of flooding days — when water levels were at least 0.5 meters above a benchmark — totaled 8 between 1975 to 1984, and 146 between 2012 and 2021, the NASA data shows. Already, the estimated annual cost to small island developing states — a group of 39 nations that includes Jamaica and Fiji — from coastal flooding is more than $1.6 billion a year. A higher frequency of major floods threatens to overwhelm Nauru's coastal population centers, government buildings, and the nation's only airport — with a runway that's adjacent to the ocean, said Alexei Trundle, associate director (international) at the Melbourne Centre for Cities, and who is helping Nauru develop a vulnerability assessment report. On a July morning last year after heavy rainfall, houses were left inundated and roads were cut off, said Paul Dargusch, director of Monash Business School's Pacific Action for Climate Transitions, and who was visiting to conduct climate research. 'The whole population lives around the fringe of the country, and three or four parts of that — the most populated parts around that fringe — are very exposed to storm surges,' he said. Passport sales alone won't fully cover the costs of Nauru's Higher Ground Initiative, first outlined in 2019, and officials are exploring the potential to also win support from public and private sources. An initial A$102 million ($65 million) phase is underway to free up about 10 hectares of land on the island's so-called Topside, which was mined for phosphate — commonly used in fertilizer — for about a century from the early 1900s. Nauru gained independence in 1968. Nauru's per capita GDP plunged as its phosphate reserves were depleted, triggering a range of government efforts to generate new revenue, from establishing a sovereign wealth fund, to backing a London musical that flopped, and a contentious agreement to detain asylum seekers for Australia. The nation previously came under pressure from the US over concerns that an earlier investor passport programme was vulnerable to exploitation by international criminals. Nauru passports had been used by terrorists, including al-Qaeda operatives, and the sales were halted in 2003.
The Guardian
18-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘Served their time': Nauru president backs Australian plan to resettle three members of NZYQ cohort
The Nauruan president has defended his government's offer to resettle three members of the NZYQ cohort of non-citizens from Australia – described by Australia as violent offenders – saying they have 'served their time'. Australia's home affairs minister, Tony Burke, announced on Sunday that the three men – one convicted of murder – would be resettled in Nauru after the Albanese government struck a deal with the tiny Pacific nation for an undisclosed amount of money. Interviewed by a government staffer and speaking Nauruan, the president, David Adeang, emphasised the three men had 'served their time' in Australian prisons, and were no longer subject to any punishment. 'Australia is trying to send them back to their country but they are not wanted back home. So we accepted them from Australia. They are not Australian and Australia doesn't want them,' he said in an interview posted online. Adeang said Nauru had demonstrated its capability and willingness to resettle migrants during its history as an offshore processing site. 'Even for the refugees that came here, they have the same history: some of them killed people, some of them are disturbed people. But they will not do that here, instead they will live their life as normal and be happy along with us all.' Adeang said the three men had been granted 30-year visas and the right to settle and work in Nauru. 'They will be living among us like normal free people … nothing stops them from working and being a normal citizen. They are also subject to our laws, they will also get same punishment if they break the law.' At least one of the three men re-detained in Australia ahead of his removal to Nauru had been told he would be flown to the Pacific island next Monday. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email But sources in contact with the men told Guardian Australia a legal challenge was being contemplated. The men were released from indefinite immigration detention to live in the community as part of a larger cohort of more than 280 non-citizens after the high court ruled in 2023 it was unlawful for the government to detain someone indefinitely. Two of the men had been taken back into detention in Villawood, in Sydney, while another was re-detained at Western Australia's Yongah Hill detention centre. The deal with Nauru will test laws passed in November that give the Australian government the power to pay third countries to accept unlawful non-citizens on a removal pathway, allowing them to be re-detained if they refuse. The Australian government has refused to say how much it has paid Nauru to take the three men, or if other concessions were offered, but Burke said the deal was proposed by Nauru. Burke said he expected a legal challenge to the decision to remove the men whom he described as 'violent offenders'. 'Whenever I make any decision, I presume that there'll be a contest in the courts,' he said on Sunday, adding he was confident of the legality of the government's position. Australia now holds about 100 refugees and asylum seekers on Nauru. Those are people who arrived by boat to Australia to claim asylum but were forcibly removed to Nauru under Australia's 'enduring' offshore processing regime with the Pacific nation. Abdul*, an asylum seeker who had been held on Nauru for eight months, said while housing in the processing centre – which is not locked – was sufficient, 'we cannot eat enough'. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion 'We cannot get enough money to buy enough nutritious food, we never have three meals a day, only two meals a day. Everybody has lost weight, and is very sick. 'And we are so stressed, we cannot sleep, we are worrying always about our future. We can't find any hope, and we cannot spend our life like this for an indefinite period.' Abdul said he did not believe the new transfers would be accepted within Nauru's tight-knit familial community. 'Everyone sent here is suffering, we are all going hungry, and these people will also be suffering if they are sent here.' Jana Favero, the deputy chief executive of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, said the government's actions sent 'a clear message': 'If you are not born in this country, you will never be treated equally.' She said that the forcible transfer was announced in the media, possibly in the shadow of a federal election being called, raising questions about the fairness of these actions. 'We are considering all options, including legal challenges, and will continue to fight for people's rights. 'There has to be consideration of the lawfulness of banishing people offshore when they've been living as part of our community.' Amnesty International said the government's move to forcibly detain and deport people to Nauru was a 'blatant attack' on the rights of people seeking protection and a 'back-door deportation scheme' to continue people's indefinite detention when it had been ruled unlawful by Australian courts. Amnesty argued the new policy effectively extended people's indefinite detention elsewhere. 'This decision sets a dangerous precedent for future policies that could see more people removed without proper safeguards,' Zaki Haidari, Amnesty International Australia's refugee rights campaigner, said. 'The Labor government must put an immediate stop to these deportations.' As of December 2024, 64 of the NZYQ cohort are subject to electronic monitoring while a nighttime curfew is imposed on 37.
