Human rights and wrongs: the Australian calling out oppression at home and around the world

Undeterred by the scale of challenges in her in-tray, the new head of Human Rights Watch, Tirana Hassan, says ‘We need to be standing with those people’

Tirana Hassan may be responsible for calling out abuses around the world, but the new global head of Human Rights Watch remains shocked by her home country of Australia’s “dehumanising” treatment of asylum seekers and refugees.

Hassan visited the notorious Woomera immigration detention facility in central Australia when she was in the final year of a law degree and found “hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis, Iranians and Afghans who had just been wallowing without access to legal representation”.

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This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.