Being a refugee in Indonesia

On the 21 March 2016, the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law hosted a lunchtime seminar to discuss the social and legal situations of asylum seekers and refugees in Indonesia.  Guest speakers Nikolas Feith Tan and Antje Missbach discussed the lack of effective protection and the day-to-day handling of asylum seekers and refugees in Indonesia.  They looked specifically at the case study of the Rohingya, who have been treated quite differently compared to other asylum seekers and refugees in Indonesia.

Antje Missbach is a senior research fellow at Monash University in Melbourne. Her current research interests include transit migration, diaspora politics, as well as border and mobility studies. She studied Southeast Asian studies and anthropology at Humboldt University in Berlin and obtained a PhD from the Australian National University for a thesis about the long-distance politics of the Acehnese diaspora. During her postdoctoral fellowship at the Melbourne Law School she conducted long-term fieldwork on asylum seekers stuck in transit in Indonesia. Since 2013, she has carried out ARC-funded research on people-smuggling networks in Indonesia. Her latest publications include Troubled Transit: Asylum seekers stuck in Indonesia (2015) and Linking people: Connections and encounters between Australians and Indonesians (with Jemma Purdey, 2015).

Nikolas Feith Tan is a PhD fellow at the Danish Institute for Human Rights and Aarhus University in international refugee law. His doctorate looks at state cooperation in the field of migration control. An Australian lawyer, Nikolas is a former officer of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He holds a Master of Law from the University of Copenhagen and Bachelors of Law and Arts (Political Science) from the University of Melbourne. He is currently a visiting researcher at the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law.

Listen to audio from this event here or via iTunes.

Or watch the video from the event: