Border Politics

In this film, leading Human Rights barrister, Julian Burnside AO, deconstructs harsh asylum seeker policies around the world, arguing that failure in political leadership is compromising human rights and destroying democratic principles in the West. Burnside is one of Australia’s leading commercial barristers, successfully representing some of Australia’s most high profile business people. Until the late 1990s, he mainly acted for the ‘big end of town’. But all that changed in 2001 when he was asked to act pro bono in the Tampa case and discovered that Australia was doing very disturbing things to refugees. Since then he has become one of the most outspoken defenders of the rights of refugees and asylum seekers and a fierce critic of Australian government policy. He believes that successive Australian governments have failed to meet their international obligations, breaching the Declaration of Human Rights, the International Rights of the Child and the Refugee Convention. (Ronin Films)