Vanessa Redgrave Quotes

Displacement is very tough on the people who are displaced and for the country that is hosting them.

Can you really send back people to where they are fleeing from?

States shall not expel or return a refugee … to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.

In the global world, we have an unprecedented mobility of peoples, we are aware of the needs of refugees and asylees, and not to speak of the 30 million displaced persons as a result of civil wars within their own countries. And yet the map that we navigate literally is the map of the nation state, and so we have no way as a world community of addressing this problem of border movement and trans-border justice, except through the categories of nation state.

Sending genuine refugees to face persecution in order to dissuade others from seeking to come here is plainly illegal.

History has not looked kindly on us when we've prevented people fleeing violence from seeking refuge in this country.

We need a legal and political understanding of the right of the refugee, whereby no solution for one group produces a new class of refugees - you can't solve a refugee problem by producing a new, potentially greater refugee problem.

Fleeing persecution is not a crime. And we do not seek to pander to a noisy, tiny minority who will never embrace modern multicultural Australia. But there are important truths we must face. There is a history and a reality that we cannot ignore. The challenge before us is real, the questions we grapple with as elemental as life and death.

We pray for the many brothers and sisters who seek refuge far from their native lands, who seek a home where they can live without fear: that they might always be respected in their dignity.

There's a great op-ed piece by Kurt Johnson, who runs The List Project, that I recommend everyone read. He was talking about how he's been trying to get out of Iraq who were our allies, who are now subject to torture, and their families are being killed because of their alliance to the United States.

I'm in total sympathy with Dick Smith's sentiments; I only wish there were grounds for saying we Australians would never tolerate such appalling treatment of refugees being carried out in our name.

While the war in Iraq was raging, I spent some time in neighbouring Jordan, meeting with Iraqi refugees who fled their country to try to find some place of safety. I interviewed many families about what had happened to them and what they did as a result.

On the screen I saw tanks rolling through dusty streets, and fallen buildings, and forests of unfamiliar trees into which East Pakistani refugees had fled, seeking safety over the Indian border.

This is the most terrible thing that can happen in a friendly country if Thai people have to escape from the backdoor of an embassy.

If I was in a refugee camp somewhere on the Pakistani border, of course I'd want to come to Australia.

Most of the people who are coming to Australia by boat have passed through several countries on the way, and if they simply wanted asylum they could have claimed that in any of the countries through which they'd passed.

We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.

I wish we didn't have to own up to a policy deliberately designed to inflict suffering on people who have already been traumatised in the countries from which they've fled.

I am the face of a refugee. I was once a refugee. I was with my family in exile.

Through both our admissions policies and, equally importantly, through our support for international protection and assistance, the United States leads the world in responding to refugee and related humanitarian crises.

The migrant question is directly linked to the crisis in Syria and Iraq.

I've been working for refugees for years and years and years.

I have been made stateless and hounded for my act of political expression.

It shouldn't be the asylum seekers wondering which country they want go to. It should be Europe telling them where to be, be it Lithuania, Sweden, or wherever.

When I was first lady, I worked to call attention to the plight of refugees fleeing Cambodia for Thailand, I visited Thailand and witnessed firsthand the trauma of parents and children separated by circumstance beyond their control.