AUSTRALIA

‘We will not be silent’: prominent women press Morrison government for violence and harassment reform

Katharine Murphy and Daniel Hurst
Sat, 5 March 2022

Grace Tame
Australian activist

Prominent women, including the former Australian of the year Grace Tame and the former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins, are launching a fresh call for the Morrison government to implement significant policies to protect women and children from violence, harassment and discrimination.

On the eve of International Women’s Day, the new coalition – which includes Christine Holgate, Lucy Turnbull, the former Liberal MP Julia Banks, as well as the film-maker and Indigenous advocate Larissa Behrendt, the youth advocate Yasmin Poole, the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Michele O’Neil, the businesswoman Wendy McCarthy, the consent activist Chanel Contos, the Paralympic gold medalist Madison de Rozario, and The Parenthood’s Georgie Dent – has launched a social media campaign to press for reforms.

Related: NSW to revisit economic gender disparity in the wake of Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins

The high-powered group is calling on the government to implement the central recommendation of the Respect@Work report – imposing a positive duty on employers to safeguard their staff from sexual harassment.

In addition, the call is for 10 days paid family and domestic violence leave, full implementation of the National Plan for First Nations Women and Girls, ensuring effective employment programs for women with disability, enacting stronger and consistent child sexual assault laws, and legislative measures to address the gender pay gap.

The group is also seeking the provision of free, accessible and quality early childhood education and care, expansion of paid parental leave, and embedding respectful relationships and consent education in schools, universities, workplaces and homes.

In a new video message fronted by members of the coalition, the women make it clear they want to continue the momentum of 2021 – an extraordinary year where thousands of Australian women and their allies took part in public demonstrations triggered by a #MeToo moment in the Australian parliament.

In February, Scott Morrison, along with other political leaders, apologised for the “terrible things” that happened in parliament workplaces and acknowledged a culture of bullying, abuse, harassment “and in some cases even violence” built up over decades.

Morrison’s apology followed a landmark review by Australia’s sex discrimination commissioner, Kate Jenkins, in 2021 into federal parliament’s culture.

The Jenkins review, which recommended a significant overhaul of the workplace culture, found one in three staffers interviewed had been sexually harassed. That inquiry was constituted after Higgins, a former government adviser, alleged she was raped by a colleague after hours in a Parliament House ministerial office in March 2019.

The new social media campaign video opens with Tame, a survivor of sexual assault, declaring: “Australia – we need to talk”.

The women note that 2021 “wasn’t the first year that women in Australia were harassed or unsafe or ignored or disrespected”.

“It wasn’t even the first year that women spoke up about these things. But in 2021 more Australians started to listen to women of different ages, occupations and beliefs, who stood up and spoke out, exposing discrimination, harassment, sexism, disrespect and intimidation,” they say. “And the more people listened, the more familiar the story became”.

In a joint statement, members of the coalition noted one in five Australian women would be sexually assaulted or raped in her lifetime, and one in three women would encounter workplace sexual harassment.

Brittany Higgins triggered parliament’s #MeToo reckoning. 

Photograph: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

Poole, Plan International’s national ambassador and advocate for girls’ rights, noted: “If you’re a First Nations woman, a woman of colour, have a disability or identify as LGBTIQ+, those statistics are even worse.”
Morrison governments announces funding

Separately, the Morrison government announced on Sunday it would spend $189m over five years on strengthening prevention and early intervention efforts in family, domestic and sexual violence.

The pledge includes $104m over five years for the primary prevention organisation Our Watch, which will help it to drive change in the corporate sector and raise awareness about gendered violence.

The minister for women, Marise Payne, said Our Watch would also develop safety programmes for use in Tafes, universities, the media, workplaces and sports organisations.

“Our Watch will also boost its efforts in prevention for LGBTIQA+ Australians, Australians with disability and migrant women and develop further resources to educate young people about consent,” Payne said.

The government will fund two new campaigns to run across mass media channels, including television, cinema, social media and bus stops.

One of the campaigns will be adapted from Scotland’s “Don’t Be That Guy” initiative and will ask men to consider “how they can hold each other to account because sexual violence should not be considered a women’s problem to solve”.

The other government-funded campaign will target young people 12 and older and their parents.

The minister for women’s safety, Anne Ruston, said new research showed while almost nine in 10 Australians polled agreed “adults should talk to young people more about the topic of consent”, almost half of Australians were confused about the issue of sexual consent. That led them to actively avoid the topic.

“Today we are also making the announcement to fund a survey of secondary school-age students so that we can understand what are the issues that they are confronted with as they make their journey through life and to make sure that they have a better understanding of consent,” Ruston said.

Related: Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins: nine key moments from the sellout press club event

The Australian Human Rights Commission will develop the survey in partnership with coalition member Contos, who is the founder of Teach Us Consent.

Ruston said the government was committed to making Australia “a country where everybody lives free from fear of violence and free from violence”.

Patty Kinnersly, the chief executive of Our Watch, said the organisation was seeing “record demand for our support and services in universities, workplaces and sporting clubs and organisations” and community sentiment was changing.

“We are now talking about consent, we are now talking about violence against women being in the public domain, we are now giving people in the community to be bystanders and not let the sexist joke go past,” Kinnersly said.

The numbers that expose the horrifying extent of the UK’s rape crisis: The government is failing women

Women carry placards during the London Reclaim the Night march, protesting against sexual violence, and violence against women and girls. 

(Hollie Adams/Getty Images)

Matilda Long
19 February 2022

In June 2021, the government apologised to rape victims.

Launching an "end to end" review of how cases of sexual assault and violence are handled, ministers said they were "deeply ashamed" of the way survivors had been failed and let down.

The then justice secretary Robert Buckland acknowledged "systemic failings" meant victims, most of whom are women, were not seeing justice, and pledged that he "would not rest until real improvements are made."

As part of the rape review, the government promised a "reversal of the trends of the last five years", pledging to return the number of cases prosecuted to the levels seen in 2016/17.

Despite these promises, the latest data shows that little has improved for victims, with experts warning that "the picture for how rape is treated in the criminal justice system remains the same".

The scale of the issue is huge, with analysis of official statistics suggesting that hundreds of thousands of women were raped last year. However, a lack of confidence in the system means that only a small proportion of victims come forward.

Yahoo News UK has analysed the latest data, finding that the justice system is showing no signs of improving.
Reported rapes higher than ever

The number of rapes and sexual assaults recorded by police in England and Wales are at a record high, according to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Some 170,973 sexual offences were recorded by police in the year to September 2021, 63,136 of which were rape.

This represents a 12% year-on-year increase in the the number of recorded sexual offences.

Recorded rapes in England and Wales are at a record high (Yahoo News UK/Flourish/ONS)

According to the ONS, there are multiple likely factors behind the the increase, including an increase in the number of victims, as well as the impact of high-profile incidents, such as the rape and murder of Sarah Everard at the hands of serving Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens.

Such incidents can encourage members of the public to come forward and report crimes they have experienced.

The ONS cautions that the figures are by no means a true representation of the scale of the problem, with data suggesting that fewer than one in six victims of rape or assault by penetration report the crime to the police. This suggests that more than 350,000 people were raped in England and Wales last year.

And, for the victims who do come forward, more often than not their bravery is not rewarded.
Almost all rape reports do not result in a charge

On the same day the ONS released its record figures, Home Office statistics revealed the proportion of reported rapes leading to a charge is lower than ever.

In the year to September 2021, fewer than one in 75 of reported rapes led to a charge.

Less than one in 75 reported rapes lead to a charge in 2021 (Yahoo News UK/Flourish/Home Office)

The proportion dropped from 9.7% in 2016 to 1.3% in 2021, the lowest figure ever recorded.

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper called the latest figures "truly appalling".

"Shocking crime figures out today show the rape prosecution rate has got even worse." she said.

"The Conservative government is completely failing to tackle violence against women and girls."

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper called the latest Home Office figures on rape prosecutions "truly appalling". (PA Images)

The woeful numbers of prosecutions for rape prompted the victims' commissioner to say that rape has been "effectively decriminalised".

In her 2019/20 report, Dame Vera warned: "We are enabling persistent predatory sex offenders to go on to reoffend in the knowledge that they are highly unlikely to be held to account."

Since she wrote the report, the prosecution rate has dropped further.

Furthermore, Home Office data shows that a large proportion of cases are being dropped because the victim withdraws their support.

This, according to Dame Vera, is often because "they cannot face the unwarranted and unacceptable intrusion into their privacy".

The rape review included promises to make the process of reporting a rape less traumatic for victims, such as ending the practice of the "digital strip search" of all their communication, and returning their phone within 24 hours.

Despite this, in 2021, two in five rape offences (42%) were closed because the victim did not support further police action.

Victims withdrew their support in almost half of rape cases in the year to September 2021 (Yahoo News UK/Flourish/Home Office)

The rape review pledged to bring prosecutions and conviction numbers back to levels recorded in 2016.

The latest data from the CPS shows that, while there have been small increases in the overall numbers since 2020, these are far below the level needed to meet the government's own targets.

Rape prosecutions and convictions are far below 2016 levels

 (Yahoo News UK/Flourish/CPS)

The true extent of rape

While police recorded cases of rape make for concerning reading, research by the ONS suggests these represent just 17% of rapes taking place, due to victims' reluctance to come forward.

The most recent Crime Survey for England and Wales found that fewer than one in six victims reported the assault to the police.



Boris Johnson says he cannot guarantee Rape Review targets to improve prosecution and conviction rates will be met by 2024

Boris Johnson has said he cannot guarantee that targets to improve rape prosecution and conviction rates set out in the government's Rape Review will be met.

An ONS spokesperson said: "Sexual offences are often hidden crimes that are not reported to the police.

"Therefore, data held by the police can only provide a partial picture of the actual level of crime experienced.

And, while younger women were more likely to be a victim of rape or sexual assault, they were less likely to report the crime.

Some 12.9% of women aged 16 to 19 experienced sexual assault in the year to March 2020 

(Yahoo News UK/Flourish/ONS)

In for the year ending March 2020, 12.9% of women aged 16 to 19 reported being a victim of sexual assault, and 2.7% reported being raped.

However, just 10% of 16 to 19-year-olds reported their assault to the police, compared with 27% of 35 to 44-year-olds.

The reasons cited by women for not reporting their crimes reveal a deep mistrust in the police to properly handle their case.

Asked their reasons for not reporting to the police, a shocking 25.2% said they didn't think officers would believe them.

Some 38.7% said they didn't think the police could help, and 14.9% thought the police would not be sympathetic.

Almost a third of women who were raped, 30.9%, didn't tell anyone at all, with 45.6% citing embarrassment, and 24.8% saying they didn't think anyone would believe them.

Since this research was conducted, women's mistrust in police has worsened.

In a poll conducted after the rape, kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard by serving Met Police officer Wayne Couzens, nearly have of women said they had lost trust in the police.

The case of Sarah Everard, who was kidnapped, raped and murdered by serving police officer Wayne Couzens, has damaged women's trust in policing, polls show

 (PA Images)

Rebecca Hitchen, Head of Policy and Campaigns at the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW), said: “Our justice system is broken and failing women. Despite continuous promises to improve and targets to meet, the system is completely stagnant when it comes to rape. Likewise, the alarming downward trajectory in charging, prosecuting and convicting in cases of domestic abuse requires urgent and serious attention.

"We can’t talk about rebuilding women’s trust in the police and justice system while there is no tangible positive change to the things that matter – seeing justice and getting the specialist support survivors need.

"Almost one year on from the public outcry following Sarah Everard’s murder, very little if anything has changed in the response to violence against women. Once again we’re calling on the government and CPS to give this deeply unjust issue the attention it warrants, demonstrate strong leadership and ensure proper accountability.”

A government spokesperson told Yahoo News UK: “We are committed to restoring faith in the justice system for rape victims.

"We are recruiting 20,000 police officers and more Independent Sexual Violence Advisors while consulting on a Victims’ Law – delivering on our commitment to transform our entire response to rape.”

"We are also sparing rape victims the stress of testifying in court, making investigations less intrusive for victims and have introduced new justice scorecards to hold justice agencies to account."

Caring roles block career advancement for three in five women

Donna Ferguson
Sat, 5 March 2022

Photograph: Maskot/Getty Images

Research shows as many as 50% of ethnic minority carers say responsibilities hold them back from finding new positions

Three out of five women say their caring responsibilities for children and other vulnerable or elderly relatives are preventing them from applying for a new job or promotion, while only one in five men say the same, according to new research.

The poll of 5,444 people by Ipsos Mori and the charity Business in the Community (BITC) found that nearly half the workforce are combining paid work and care. Almost three in 10 adults have left or considered leaving a job because of difficulties in balancing work and care. The latter was particularly true of women.

The majority of those with care responsibilities in the UK are parents looking after children under the age of 18, but 36% of carers are responsible for an adult of working age or older.

Those from a black, Asian, mixed race or other ethnically diverse background were significantly more likely to say they have caring responsibilities than those from a white background. As many as 50% of carers from an ethnic minority say their caring responsibilities are holding them back from applying for promotions or new positions at work, compared to 39% of white carers.

BITC Gender Equality campaign director Charlotte Woodworth said the results showed the disconnect between what workers – particularly women and people from ethnic minority backgrounds – need from employers and what they experience in the labour market. “There’s a lot of competing ideas about how we should try to improve the lot of women, how we should try and create a more levelled-up society. This report tells us very clearly how significantly workplace policies and workplace cultures are undermining those efforts,” she said.

Workers on low incomes are among the most badly treated. While some 75% of those earning £26,000 or more said they felt supported by their employer to manage their caring responsibilities for children, this dropped to just one in two people earning less than that amount.

The research shows nearly one in 10 carers are “sandwich carers”, meaning they have caring responsibilities for both a child and an adult.

Instead of expecting women, for example, to somehow juggle it all, workplaces need to change, Woodworth says: “It’s very clear that some groups are much more dramatically affected than others, and have a much harder time than others, but it’s not about problematising those groups, it’s about the workplace shifting its expectations, its norms, its cultures to better reflect the needs of the people who are trying to engage with it.”

The charity wants the government and employers to offer new fathers more ring-fenced, paid time off to look after their children when they are born, so that childcare responsibilities can be shared more equally between couples from the start of a child’s life.

The research found that even among women who identify as joint carers, 52% say they do “more than my fair share”, in comparison to 10% of men. One in three men admit they do “less than my fair share”, in comparison to 4% of women. Women are also significantly more likely than men to say their day job has been interrupted because of caring responsibilities, with many women saying they do more than their fair share because their partner’s working pattern or culture is unsupportive of work and care.

She hopes employers and the government will see the pandemic as a watershed moment. “The pandemic was bad for a lot of people with care responsibilities, and it was particularly bad on the gendered front. When lockdown happened, women were more likely to be furloughed and working mothers were more likely to lose their jobs than working fathers.”

But at the same time, she says, the pandemic made everyone more aware of the challenges faced by working carers. “It did have the effect of making people more aware of how hard it is to combine paid work with care, and it challenged and debunked a lot of old-fashioned ideas around what effective and productive work looks like.”

Scientists probe how everyday pollutants can harm unborn babies - from clothing to cleaning products

Zaina Alibhai
Fri, 4 March 2022

((AFP))

The impact everyday pollutants have on the development of unborn children will be investigated in a major new study.

Previous research has shown the harm air pollution can have on the growth and size of foetuses, as well as the link to premature births.

Scientists at Swansea University will focus their efforts on outdoor pollutants and traffic fumes as well as indoor pollutants such as wood burning stoves, cleaning products and cooking for the study.

It will be the first to track how the function of different organs, such as the lungs and brain, is impacted by pollution leading ultimately to poor health in childhood.

Biological samples will be taken from various pregnant volunteers at various times throughout their pregnancy, with scientists to then analyse the effects of airborne material.

They will be taken from the nasal cavity, peripheral and umbilical cord blood, placenta and sperm.

The samples will then be exposed to PM2.5 - a cocktail of chemical and biological contaminants including house dust, volatile organic compounds and chemicals found in cleaning products.

As well as this, they will also be exposed to other airborne materials such as pollen and viruses.

Scientists will also measure the exposure to natural pollutants within the homes of pregnant women, how the women respond to the environment and then follow the health of their children as they grow up.

Professor Cathy Thornton, Professor of Human Immunology at Swansea University, said: “Our UK wide collaboration will be the first to explore how pregnant women might respond differently to air pollution as a way of understanding the health consequences for their children.

“Alongside this we will work with pregnant women and their families, the wider public, local and national government as well as businesses to monitor indoor and outdoor air pollution exposures of pregnant women and relate these to later health outcomes of the child.

“This ambitious approach is intended to inform policy and the development of interventions including the development of simple tools to quickly monitor the success of an intervention.

The four-year project has received £3.4 million funding from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) through a programme which aims to increase multidisciplinary research in key areas of air quality including human health.

Professor Sir Stephen Holgate, UKRI’s Clean Air Champion, said: “Poor air quality affects millions of lives, but the impact of pollutants indoors is little understood.

“Funding research in this area is a key priority of UK Research and Innovation. By sharing our findings with local and national government, business, charities and the public, we hope this research will reduce the ill-effects of pregnancy air pollution exposures on child health.”

Rising temperatures put women and girls in danger. 

Pregnancy drives risk even higher.

Morgan McFall-Johnsen
Sat, 5 March 2022

Rising temperatures put women and girls in danger. Pregnancy drives risk even higher.


Women collect water from a stream outside the village of Tsemera in Ethiopia's northern Amhara region, February 13, 2016.

Katy Migiro/Reuters


Women and girls face unique risks as the climate crisis deepens, according to a new UN report.


Water scarcity can lead to increased violence against women and girls, who are often responsible for fetching water.


Pregnancy adds further risk. Extreme heat is associated with more preterm births and stillbirths.

Roughly half of people on the planet are at heightened risk from climate change, a grim report published this week by the United Nations revealed. Women and girls, along with pregnant people and the fetuses they carry, face greater health and safety issues from rising temperatures than men.

"All women are at increased risk," Rupa Basu, chief of air and climate epidemiology at the California Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, who was not involved in the report, told Insider.

Women and girls are both more likely than men to die in extreme weather events, more at risk of domestic and sexual violence in the aftermath, and more likely to suffer food insecurity, according to the report. When pregnant, such catastrophes can lead to serious complications.

Liz Foster, who is 38 weeks pregnant, talks to her son at a fountain at Yards Park in Washington, on June 21, 2012.Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo


"Women are more exposed, and this is because we see that climate change exacerbates existing inequalities so much," Marlene Achoki, who co-leads global policy on climate justice for the humanitarian organization CARE, told Insider.

Men often have control over critical resources like food and water, while women tend to have less credit and mobility to help them adapt to new extremes, according to the report.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recruited hundreds of scientists to summarize years of research for its sixth climate assessment. The first working group shared its findings last year, focusing on the physical changes to our planet. Monday's publication, from the second working group, examines how those changes will affect ecosystems and human lives.

The report projects that extreme weather — floods, droughts, and heat waves — will become more frequent and more severe in the coming decades, driving food and water shortages across the globe. To protect women, girls, and pregnant people, governments must start preparing for these disasters, and their health outcomes, now.

"I'm happy to see that pregnant women and women and girls are included in this report," Basu said, adding, "For so long, they were kind of just missed as being a high-risk population."
Women trek miles in extreme heat and face violence to fetch water

Women carry water jerrycans on their heads in Kilifi county, Kenya, on February 16, 2022.Baz Ratner/Reuters

In places where drinking water doesn't come from a tap, women and girls trek out of town to collect water, according to the IPCC report. During droughts, they often have to walk to more distant water sites, putting them at risk of heat stroke, as well as gender-based violence.

Aditi Mukherji, who led the water chapter of the new IPCC report, said where she lives in India, women have to walk long distances for water. Achoki said she's seen the same thing in Kenya.

"When I travel to the northern part of our country, that is at the edge of the border, it is so hot. Just one step when I land down to the airstrip and I feel like going back to the plane," Achoki told Insider.

In this heat, she said, women and girls sometimes walk as far as 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) to fetch water. When they reach it, long lines often await them. In the process, they face an increased risk of injuries, encounters with dangerous animals, and sexual abuse, such as demand for sexual favors in exchange for water, according to the IPCC report.

A woman collects grain at a camp for internally displaced people in Adadle district in the Somali region, Ethiopia, on January 22, 2022.Claire Nevill/World Food Programme/Reuters

Increased access to water, like local community taps, wells, and better water-storage facilities could help protect women and girls as droughts grow more prolonged and severe. The challenge is getting governments and organizations to pay for those fixes.

"It's not as if the solutions are new or anything. It's often about lack of finance," Mukerheji told Insider.
Risks rise during pregnancy: 'You feel a little helpless in a way'

Summer Weeks, 23, who is pregnant, shades her eyes from the sun in a remote area of the Bodaway Chapter in the Navajo Nation outside of Gap, Arizona, on September 14, 2020.

Stephanie Keith/Reuters

Basu usually runs cold — she'll find herself shivering on warm, sunny days in Oakland, California. But that changed when she got pregnant. Suddenly she would heat up and break out in a sweat, while everyone around her seemed perfectly comfortable.

"I just couldn't regulate my body temperature," she said.

She had studied how heat affects high-risk populations, like older people, but she didn't expect to be one of them anytime soon.

"I was kind of feeling like, 'Oh, I get it now. I can feel it,'" she said. "You feel a little helpless in a way."

Basu's experience made her wonder if pregnant people, too, were uniquely vulnerable to extreme heat.

A pregnant woman wears a mask during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.Charles Krupa/AP Photo

Soon she led an analysis of nearly 60,000 births across 16 California counties, comparing birth outcomes with weekly averages of apparent temperature (which accounts for humidity) from the parents' residential zip codes. She found that an increase of 10 degrees Fahrenheit was associated with 8.6% more preterm births. The study was published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2010.

Since then, further studies have found similar relationships between temperature increases or heat waves and a rise in preterm births or stillbirths.

"Only in the last decade do we have any data at all to support the association between heat and adverse birth outcomes," Basu said.

Several studies cited in the IPCC report suggest that extreme heat, airborne particulates like those carried in wildfire smoke, and water-related illnesses are linked to higher rates of miscarriage, stillbirth, low birth weight, and preterm birth.

A pregnant mother receives the COVID-19 vaccine at a maternity clinic in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on Aug. 24, 2021.

(Photo by Ajith Perera/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Still, heat advisories often leave pregnant people out of their recommendations for vulnerable populations. Similar to older or immunocompromised people, Basu said, pregnant people may need to take extra precautions — keeping cool and inactive on hot days, or staying indoors with an air filter when wildfire smoke adds moderate levels of particulate matter to the air.

"I keep coming back to the same point, to not just look at the general population and see what's happening, but then to look at the really high-risk, most vulnerable populations and also consider them," Basu said, adding, "I think that's often missed, and then we're not really getting the whole picture."

Scientists discover why the Andes are rising up as glaciers melt

Rob Waugh
·Contributor
Tue, 1 March 2022

The mountains of Patagonia are 'growing' (Ben Tiger)

The glaciers on the Andes mountain range are melting quickly at some of the fastest rates on the planet but scientists have been confused as to why the ground beneath them is rising up rapidly too - until now.

When glaciers melt, a tremendous weight is lifted from the ground that once supported them.

The newly unburdened earth rebounds and rises - but in Patagonia, it’s happening to an extreme level.

Geologists have discovered a link between recent ice mass loss, rapid rock uplift and a gap between tectonic plates that underlie Patagonia, using a seismic study of the Patagonian Andes.

The Andes has some of the steepest peaks in the world. (Getty)

Read more: Melting snow in Himalayas drives growth of green sea slime visible from space

Hannah Mark, a former Steve Fossett postdoctoral fellow in earth and planetary sciences at Washington University said: "Variations in the size of glaciers, as they grow and shrink, combined with the mantle structure that we've imaged in this study are driving rapid and spatially variable uplift in this region.”

The seismic data shows how a gap in the down-going tectonic plate about 60 miles beneath Patagonia has enabled hotter, less viscous mantle material to flow underneath South America.

Above this gap, the icefields have been shrinking, removing weight that previously caused the continent to flex downward.

These conditions are driving many of the recent changes that have been observed in Patagonia, including the rapid uplift in certain areas once covered by ice.

Read more: Why economists worry that reversing climate change is hopeless

Guanaco in Chilean Patagonia. (Getty)

Read more: A 1988 warning about climate change was mostly right

Seismologist Douglas Wiens, Robert S. Brookings Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, said: "Low viscosities mean that the mantle responds to deglaciation on the time scale of tens of years, rather than thousands of years, as we observe in Canada for example.

“This explains why GPS has measured large uplift due to the loss of ice mass.

"Another significant thing is that the viscosity is higher beneath the southern part of the Southern Patagonia Icefield compared to the Northern Patagonia Icefield, which helps to explain why uplift rates vary from north to south.”

Geologists see evidence of this combination of ice mass changes and uplift in places all over the world.

There's no turning back.

Wiens first visited Patagonia more than 25 years ago. He said that he is shocked by changes that he has observed in his lifetime.

"The beautiful glaciers are being reduced in size," Wiens said.

"Over the coming decades, the ice fronts will recede higher up the mountains and farther into the interior, potentially making them more difficult to visit. I can easily see that the glaciers have shrunk since I first visited this area in 1996."

Should it take a war to show that sport and politics are forever linked?

Jonathan Liew
Sun, 6 March 2022

Photograph: Thomas Lovelock for OIS/AP

For years, Big Sport has said they should be kept separate. Now, events in Ukraine have shown that it was wrong

‘Happy Thursday everyone!” the official Uefa Europa League account tweeted on the morning of 24 February, looking ahead to another crucial round of matches in Europe’s second most prestigious men’s football competition. Alas, not everyone was in quite as festive a mood. For, just a few hours earlier, Russian artillery had moved into Ukraine bringing up the curtain on a bloody and avoidable war in mainland Europe.

It’s easy to forget it now, amid the breathtaking speed with which the world of sport has closed ranks against Russia, but in the hours and days after the fighting started Uefa on Twitter was hardly the only sports authority to monumentally fail to read the room. For example, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) eventually banned Russia from the Paralympic Winter Games but only after first announcing an unsatisfactory compromise in which Russian athletes would have been allowed to compete in neutral colours. Fifa only kicked the Russians out of this year’s World Cup qualifying after other European teams made it clear they were not prepared to play them.

This is, after all, how Big Sport has instinctively operated: cautiously, conservatively, with a moral cowardice that runs as deep as its avarice. With empty gestures and weasel words. Only when the scale of global outrage became apparent, only when it became obvious that any entity associated with Russia was at risk of suffering grievous, perhaps terminal reputational damage, did many governing bodies take decisive action. “There go my people,” the French revolutionary Alexandre Ledru-Rollin is said to have remarked. “I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.”

This is not a particularly new phenomenon. In 1939, the IOC was looking for a new venue for the 1940 Winter Olympics after Japan’s military aggression meant it had to relinquish hosting rights (voluntarily, rather than after any significant pressure). Hitler’s invasion of Poland soon forced the IOC to cancel the Games entirely, having first reassigned them to the charming ski resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Nazi Germany.

However, even in this digital age, it is possible to feel vaguely stunned at the speed with which the landscape of sport has now changed. The men’s Champions League final has been stripped from St Petersburg and handed to Paris. Manchester United have ended their commercial partnership with Aeroflot. Russian teams – and in some cases individual athletes – have been banned across sport, from athletics to cycling, rugby union to Formula One. It is inconceivable that Russia will be allowed to host any major sporting event for many years.

Individuals whose wealth and power were widely assumed to be impregnable have been forced to leave the stage

Most shocking of all, individuals whose wealth and power were widely assumed to be impregnable have been forced from the stage. Roman Abramovich has announced his intention to sell Chelsea FC, sensing the threat of sanctions in the UK. The Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov has stepped down as president of the International Fencing Federation and his sponsorship of Everton FC has been suspended. Even Vladimir Putin has been punished, with the International Judo Federation stripping him of the honorary presidency he has held since 2008.

Other cases are more complex. Was it right for Russian F1 driver Nikita Mazepin to be ejected from the British Grand Prix then see his Haas team contract terminated? Should individual Russian athletes be punished unless they condemn the invasion of Ukraine? Will Ivan Drago have to be censored out of the Rocky movies? In part, this is the tragedy of autocracy: the state and the individual begin to bleed into each other to the extent that it is difficult to separate them. Whether you are a billionaire oligarch, a film-maker reliant on state funding or an athlete benefiting from a centralised performance programme, it is virtually impossible to thrive in Russia without becoming entangled with the regime in some form.

But the wider lesson here is one that goes well beyond Russia and well beyond this war. For years, we have been told by the world’s sporting bodies, many of its athletes and the majority of its autocratic regimes that sport can and should be kept separate from politics. Now we realise why they were so intent on touting and maintaining this fiction. For those invested in the smooth running of international sport, either as a vehicle for commercial growth, personal enrichment or soft power, politics means questions and moral dilemmas. It means independent thought, scrutiny and oversight. It means exercising a conscience. It means change.

Now, as it turns out, an entire country can be wiped from the sporting map almost overnight if the will is there to do it. And for political reasons, rather than anything it has done on the field of play. This was possible all along! Why, then, was Russia allowed to host the 2018 Fifa World Cup? Why was the genocidal regime in China rewarded with this year’s Winter Olympics? Why have abusive governments in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia been allowed to own football clubs and cycling teams? Why is this year’s World Cup in Qatar?

The past week has been an eye-opener in many ways. Athletes leading the call to action. Public opinion forcing governing bodies into U-turns. People beginning to rethink the entire relationship between elite sport, money and power. Maybe this is just a fleeting illusion of solidarity in the jaws of a terrible human catastrophe. But if things really are going to change, this is how it starts.

• Jonathan Liew is a Guardian sports writer

On the frontline of Liberia's fight to save the pangolin

A white-bellied pangolin which was rescued from local animal traffickers. - Copyright Isaac Kasamani AFP

By Doloresz Katanich with AFP • Updated: 06/03/2022 - 09:09

Conservationists in Liberia are determined to stop the generations-old tradition of hunting pangolins, which are vulnerable to extinction due to illegal poaching.

Clutching a single-barrelled rifle in lush northern Liberia, Emmanuel says his 10 children were able to get an education thanks to his gun.

He regularly ignores the ban on hunting bushmeat and earns most of his cash catching pangolins and monkeys in the surrounding jungle.

In the dry season, Emmanuel waits for dark and then hikes into the forest with his rifle and machete.

A hunter poses for a portrait with his long barrel hunting gun on the outskirts of Bopolu on November 15, 2021

John Wessels/AFP

Pangolins, scale-covered insect-eating mammals that are typically the size of a full-grown cat, are mostly active at night, snuffling through deadwood for ants and termites.

The species is under threat worldwide but remains a delicacy in the impoverished West African country.

Their scales - made of keratin, like human nails - are also prized by consumers in Asia for their supposed medicinal properties.

"We kill it, we eat it," says Emmanuel, in a village in Gbarpolu County, five-hours drive north of the capital Monrovia along pitted dirt roads.

"Then the scales, we sell it," says the hunter. "There's no other option".

Pangolins are disappearing worldwide

A 2020 study by the US Agency for International Development estimated that between 650,000 and 8.5 million pangolins were removed from the wild between 2009 and 2020.

The population is declining worldwide due to deforestation, bushmeat consumption, and the scales trade.

A man displays a packet of Pangolin scales, ready to be sold on the outskirts of Bopolu on November 14, 2021.

John Wessels/AFP

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), seizures of pangolin scales have increased tenfold since 2014, suggesting a booming global trade.
Efforts to stamp out illegal poaching in Liberia

Pangolins are believed to be the most trafficked animal in the world and Liberia is one of the main origin countries. Over 40 per cent of the country is covered in rainforest and governance is weak. The country is also still recovering from brutal civil wars from 1989 to 2003, and from the 2014-16 Ebola crisis.

With conservationists sounding the alarm, Liberia's government banned the unlicensed hunting of protected species in 2016, imposing up to six months in prison or a maximum €4,500 ($5,000) fine.

But the government is up against the dual forces of tradition and poverty as it tries to reduce poaching of these vulnerable animals.

Delia Smith: ‘The world is in chaos… but together we have such power’


Rachel Cooke
Sun, 6 March 2022

LONG READ

Delia Smith
English cook and television presenter

At 80, Britain’s queen of cookery has written a surprising new book about spirituality that was turned down by six publishers. She talks about meditation, MasterChef and her beloved Norwich FC

Why is it so exciting – and so nerve-racking – to be meeting Delia Smith? Down the years, I’ve interviewed a lot of famous and important people (and three prime ministers), and yet I can’t remember any of them having induced this combination of extreme eagerness and mortal fear. Is it because when I was a teenager, she was one of the very few truly successful women then in public life? I suppose it must be. It’s no exaggeration to say that she was up there with the Queen, Mrs Thatcher and Madonna – and just like them, her word was The Law. For my 21st birthday, my parents gave me a cheque and a copy of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, and for all that I was still in my radical feminist stage, I hardly batted an eyelid. Simone de Beauvoir was all very well, but did she have any advice on roasting times or how to make sure your yorkshire puddings rise? No, she did not.

Anyway, one result of this desperate, anxious state was that I stupidly decided to bake a cake for her – my God, even to write such words – and when I arrive at her cottage, the conservatory of which I recognise from the TV shows she once presented there, the very first thing I do is hand it over. “It’s a bit … flat,” I say, mournfully (for those who are interested, it’s Nigella’s ordinarily easy-peasy cardamon and marzipan loaf). But it seems that I’m worrying unnecessarily. Delia looks completely delighted by my foil-wrapped house brick, cradling it in her arms as if it was a newborn baby. “You used good ingredients,” she says, kindly. “It will still taste nice.” Cooking isn’t about perfection, she tells me; it’s about achievability. “I once went to a Women’s Institute thing, and I remember thinking: I’m not at all sure my jam would pass muster here.”

It’s a beautiful, crystalline day in Suffolk – the house is deep in the countryside outside Stowmarket – and from the sofa, the view is of a pond, on which there floats a single, serene moorhen, and beyond it a line of trees. Delia and her husband, the journalist Michael Wynn-Jones, have lived here since the 1970s, but this expanse of garden is a relatively recent addition: 20 years ago, he bought the meadow as a present for her 60th birthday, and together (with some help, obviously) they sunk the pond. Was it a blessing during the lockdown? “Oh, yes. We’re very lucky. The pandemic has been terrible for so many people, but it wasn’t a hardship for us. We’re older, and we live in a beautiful place. I have an office at the bottom of the garden, and I was there every day from 9.30.” Lunch was an apple, and then, at 5.30, she would return to the house, to a supper made by Michael, who now does most of the cooking. Is he a good cook? “Yes, if he follows the recipe. When he retired, he got really interested in it. He wanted to do more and more, and I let him do more and more, though I do still love cooking and, of course, food. You’ve got to be greedy to love cooking, and I always have been. The first thing I do in the morning when I get up is think: what are we going to eat today? And I’m lucky to be married to someone who feels the same way. But cooking is the one time when I know I’m 80: all that standing, getting a backache.”

How cheering to find that she loves Pharrell Williams, marched against Brexit and idolises Greta Thunberg

How on earth can she possibly be 80? In the flesh, she looks exactly as she did the last time we saw her on screen, more than a decade ago, and perhaps even before that. Close your eyes, moreover, and this is still the voice, crisp and light and warm, that once drove us all so mad for cranberries (Delia Smith’s Winter Collection, 1995). But there’s something else, too: she is so interested in everything, enthusiasm and energy radiating from her like steam from a pan. As all the world knows, she and Michael have long been majority shareholders in their beloved Norwich City football club, and her involvement there is still all-consuming. There are its restaurants, which she oversees, and every week there are dozens of management decisions to be taken; above all, there are the matches, her appetite for which remains undimmed. “Yes, I’m afraid so. Three hours there and three hours back, sometimes. Often, there’ll be a game on a Tuesday and I might say: ‘I’m not going.’ But then Monday will come and I’ll think: ‘Actually, I am. I can’t not go.’” For her, football is about community; she believes almost anything is possible when people commit to working together, though admittedly this may not stretch to poor old Norwich’s ability to remain in the Premiership come the end of this season.

Which brings us to her new book, the one she wrote while she was sequestered in her office at the bottom of the garden. It also has to do with community. As its title suggests, You Matter: The Human Solution is not a cookbook. Rather, it is (sorry) an extended recipe for living: a nourishing broth of ideas garnered from her wide reading (its presiding spirits are the Jesuit priest and palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, and the American psychologist Abraham Maslow), seasoned lightly with her own thoughts and experiences. How to sum it up? This is tricky. It has, I think, three central premises. First, that we have not yet fully perceived just how awesome the human race is, and as a consequence we underestimate our ability to come up with solutions to our increasingly grave problems. Second, that evolution encompasses, for human beings, a trajectory of unity, one we resist at our peril. Third, that we often neglect our inner, spiritual selves, and by doing so, tend to lose our all-important sense of perspective, something that has an egregious effect on our ability even to begin to tackle the mayhem that is all around

Smith and her husband, Michael Wynn-Jones, presenting Norwich City player Emiliano Buendía with the club’s player of the season trophy, 2021. 

Photograph: Stephen Pond/Getty Images

Has Delia gone barmy? This is surely what some people are going to say when they hear about this book, and perhaps you’re thinking it even as you read this. But she doesn’t care if they do. “I’ve had a good apprenticeship when it comes to criticism,” she says. “Because I was very criticised when I was a cook. When people tell me I’m going to get a lot of flak, I think, well, no one wants to take a risk; no one wants to put their head above the parapet. This book could just sink without trace. But if it does, I won’t mind. I had to do it. I want people to know this stuff.” One of the practices she extols in You Matter is silent meditation – though she doesn’t use the m-word, on the grounds it might put people off – and the hour she spends each day sitting completely still as her mind roams where it will has brought her a kind of freedom. “Silence and stillness have taken my fear away,” she says, her voice as calm and as soothing as a bowl of custard.

When did she start thinking about these ideas? “Well, they were always bubbling around, and I did write some religious books at one stage [a Catholic convert, she used to go to mass every day; the books in question were published in the 1980s]. But I found they just went to religious people, and I wanted to write for those who don’t have any religion. The main thrust of it is that there is a whole part of our lives that is left unexplored, and this is the crucial time in our history to get into that. Things are very bad. How could we not want to look at the world and say: we’ve got to change?” A pause. “Have you seen Don’t Look Up?” she asks. I shake my head. (In case you don’t know, it’s a Netflix film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, about a comet that’s heading towards Earth, a calamity that is an allegory for the climate emergency]. “Well, it’s brilliant, and it’s also saying what I’m saying, which is that we don’t realise the power we have when we work together.”

Before I read You Matter, I hadn’t heard of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a man she describes as “a colossus” (he died in 1955). But she’s not surprised. De Chardin was a Darwinist who fell out with the church over the doctrine of original sin: “All his books were banned by the church for a time,” she says. She got into him in the 1960s. “They’re quite difficult to read. But the more mature I got, the more I realised that humanity is a phenomenon, which is what he says.” The title of her book, however, was not inspired by him, but by a piece torn from a magazine many years ago: the work of a young woman, Dorothea Lynch, who was dying of cancer (Lynch would go on to write a book, Exploding Into Life). It doesn’t always, Delia believes, take a philosopher to spell out the essence of complicated ideas. Lynch was suffering terribly, but in her pain she was able to grasp the beauty of life as never before. “Each of us is very special, very singular, carrying weight,” she wrote. “I matter. I would like to open the window tonight and yell that outside. I matter.”

Delia wishes we could all start thinking this way long before we lie dying – and this is where (she hopes) her book comes in. “The world is in chaos. We have got the war in Ukraine, concentration camps again, people freezing and starving. In our own country, some people can have heat, or they can have food… and yet, together, we have such power. People say to me: how can you get the whole world on board? Well, how did Christians get so many people on board? They were just a little band. Or Muslims? Another little band. So I can’t be put off by that. I’m very ambitious.” Her grand dream is to help her readers to achieve self-actualisation, which according to another of her gurus, Maslow, is the highest level of psychological development: the stage in life when potential may be fully realised, the rest of our needs (those that connect to our bodies and to our egos) having already been fulfilled.

Smith in 1996, the year her Winter Collection won the British book of the year award. Photograph: Wilkinson/Shutterstock

One of the ways such a state may be encouraged is via what she calls “reflective daydreaming”: that daily hour of silence she mentioned earlier. When, many years ago, she started doing this, inspired by an Indian sufi, she began slowly, clocking in 10 minutes or so at first. “It’s not easy,” she says. “It’s the hardest thing on earth to get someone to be still and quiet. But I just feel that there will be some people who will want to try it, and if we get enough people like that, the world will change.” The Beatles song Within You Without You pretty much sums up her book, she says. Pay attention to what’s inside, as well as what’s outside, and life will be better. “Let’s get away from the idea of me as a saint. I make as many mistakes as anyone. I’m always saying the wrong thing. These ideas are not virtue on my part. I just want to connect.”

If you think about it, I’m no threat to a chef, though if they do know who I am I feel bad if I leave anything

What has the response to the book been like so far? Michael scrutinised each section as she completed it. “He would say: ‘OK’. Or: ‘I don’t think you’ve got that quite right.’” But You Matter was turned down by no fewer than six publishers, in spite of the fact that Delia has sold more than 21m copies of her cookbooks. “It was tough. At one point we were looking at self-publishing.” Finally, it went to a small press: Mensch. “And thank God those six did turn it down. I couldn’t have done better.” I’ve no idea how her latest editor feels about self-actualisation. But he or she will surely have relished the glimpses its author gives of herself on the path to enlightenment. How surprising (and cheering) to find that she loves Pharrell Williams; that she marched against Brexit; that she idolises Greta Thunberg; that it is her great pleasure to take the Norwich apprentices to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia to look at paintings by Bacon and Picasso. (“In the cafeteria, these guys of 16 were collecting up the cups; they’ve been trained to think of others because you can’t become a team if you’re only interested in yourself,” she says, when I bring this up.)

In its exuberance and sincerity, You Matter is emphatically the work of an autodidact, and perhaps this is one way in which it connects, as unlikely as this sounds, to the rest of her career. She left her school in Bexleyheath at 16, and went to work first as a hairdresser. But having grown interested in cooking, at 21 she started again, this time as a dishwasher in a small restaurant in Paddington, a role that gave her the opportunity to learn on the job (eventually, she graduated to waitressing, and thence to the kitchen). Meanwhile, she spent her free time devouring cookbooks in the reading room at the British Museum, trying out the recipes she found on the family from whom she rented a room. In 1969, she was taken on by the Daily Mirror’s magazine, which is where she met Michael; the first thing she wrote was a recipe for kipper paté. From there, she moved to the Evening Standard and into television (her first appearances were on the BBC’s Look East). Again, she learned as she went along. “That was the best job,” she says, of the Standard. “I used to get a lot of letters, and I learned how to write recipes from those. Someone once asked: ‘You say the tomatoes must be peeled, but how?’ From that moment, I never wrote a recipe without explaining every part of the process.”

But she doesn’t miss writing cookbooks or making cookery programmes now. “Some people want more recipes,” she says. “But there are enough. If you’ve gone through your 50th asparagus season, there’s not a lot left to say. I left television when the era of chefs came in; what Elizabeth David called ‘theatre on a plate’, which I can’t stand. I was only about saying: ‘it’s not that difficult’.” Sometimes, she worries about her legacy: are people any better cooks now than they were when she started? “That awful MasterChef thing. You know: ‘Oh, this is a bit greasy,’ or whatever. It’s intimidating. It makes people self-conscious. They feel they’ll never be able to do it.” It’s for this reason that she has put together a cookery course on her website. “It’s the basics. A kid could learn how to make an omelette sitting on the bus.” But at other moments she is reassured. “When I once said that I’d failed [to teach the nation to cook], I got a lot of letters telling me I was wrong, and at football matches people will say: ‘Oh, my mum loves you.’” What about restaurants? Overall, haven’t we gained more than we’ve lost? She’s not sure. “I miss French food. That’s gone.” Do people make a fuss when she eats out? She laughs. “If you think about it, I’m no threat to a chef, though if they do know who I am I feel bad if I leave anything.” This week, she’s going to the Neptune, in Hunstanton, which has a Michelin star. “Usually, that would put me off, but he’s a lovely chef. It’s only slightly poncey.” What’s her favourite dish to make at home? She can’t possibly say, though the Piedmontese peppers from her Summer Collection (1993, as if I could ever forget) “do have to be eaten to be believed”.

Smith in 1975, when she was presenting her first solo TV cookery show, Family Fare. Photograph: Fred Mott/Getty Images

A friend of Delia’s who worked with her on the Standard told me that no one could be less changed by fame than her, and it is striking how straightforward she seems, how un-grand. What’s her secret? (I mean, apart from the meditation, and all the other things we’ve discussed). Does it – this is my hunch – have anything to do with her redoubtable mother, Etty, who died in 2020 aged 100? “Yes, that’s probably it. She was calm, too, and she had the same love of people. But she was also my biggest critic. ‘Coo, you’ve put on weight,’ she’d say, that sort of thing. I had quite a difficult time, and my parents’ divorce [when she was a teenager] was a trauma, though no one is without those, are they?” She thinks we have a duty to be happy if we can – or at least, not to be too discontented. But perhaps our terms are wrong. Her late friend Sister Wendy Beckett told her that, in life, “happy” is best substituted with the word “peace”. “That was wise. Happiness can seem like quite a shallow thing, like having a Mars bar or something.”

I’ve missed the train I was supposed to get, and so we talk on. She doesn’t know what she’ll do next: the press “ruined” her last book, How to Cheat at Cooking, in which she extolled the virtues of ready-prepared ingredients like powdered potato, by being “vile” about it. What about Norwich City? No, she and Michael are not selling, though if someone reasonable with money to spend came along, they would ask the supporters to vote on it. She could discuss football for ever, and it’s sweet to see how thrilled she is, still, to meet its biggest names (once my tape recorder is off, she tells me some good stories). And then, at last, it really is time for me to go. Behind the closed door of their kitchen – how I long to look in its cupboards – Michael is clattering slightly.

Back in London, I tell everyone I speak to that I’ve met Delia (no need for second names), and even my mother sounds quite impressed. But I’m still worrying about my cake. In the small hours, I picture her ruthlessly dispatching it, her foot deftly opening a pedal bin as Michael whips up some cheese on toast. Several days later, though, a parcel arrives. Inside it is a signed copy of Delia’s Cakes, and inside that is a card. As I read it, my heart expands inside me like one of her immaculate gooseberry and elderflower muffins. The cake I baked for her was delicious, she writes – and can she please have the recipe?

• You Matter: The Human Solution by Delia Smith is published by Mensch, £25 hardback/£14.99 paperback. 

More than 100 Rohingya land on beach in Indonesia's Aceh

YAYAN ZAMZAMI
Sun, 6 March 2022



sEthnic Rohingya people rest at a temporary shelter in Bireuen, Aceh province, Indonesia, Sunday, March 6, 2022. More than 100 hungry and weak Rohingya Muslims were found on a beach in Indonesia's northernmost province of Aceh on Sunday after weeks at sea, officials said. 

(AP Photo/Zik Maulana)


BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (AP) — More than 100 hungry and weak Rohingya Muslims were found on a beach in Indonesia’s northernmost province of Aceh on Sunday after weeks at sea, officials said.

The group arrived on Jangka beach near Alue Buya Pasi, a fishing village in Bireuen district, early Sunday. The villagers who saw the 114 ethnic Rohingya on a rickety wooden boat helped them to land and then reported their arrival to authorities, said Badruddin Yunus, the leader of the local tribal fishing community.

“They look very weak from hunger and dehydration after a long and severe voyage at sea,” said Yunus, adding it wasn’t clear where the group was traveling from or where it was headed because none of them could speak English or Malay.

The 58 men, 21 women and 35 children were given shelter and received help from villagers, police and military, while local authorities including the coronavirus task force were helping to process them, Yunus said.

More than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled from Buddhist-majority Myanmar to refugee camps in Bangladesh since August 2017, when the Myanmar military launched a clearance operation in response to attacks by a rebel group. Myanmar security forces have been accused of mass rapes, killings and the burning of thousands of homes.

Groups of Rohingya have attempted to leave the crowded camps in Bangladesh and travel by sea in hazardous voyages to other Muslim-majority countries in the region.

Muslim-dominated Malaysia has been a common destination for the boats, and traffickers have promised the refugees a better life there. But many Rohingya refugees who land in Malaysia face detention.

Although Indonesia is not a signatory to the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention, the UNHCR said that a 2016 presidential regulation provides a national legal framework governing the treatment of refugees on boats in distress near Indonesia and to help them disembark.

These provisions have been implemented for years, most recently in December when 105 Rohingya refugees were rescued off the coast of Bireuen toward its neighboring Lhokseumawe, a coastal town in the North Aceh district.