The men in power are convinced that it is only violence that moves and guides men, and they do so boldly use violence for the maintenance of the present order of things. But the existing order is not maintained through violence but through public opinion, the effect of which is impaired by violence. Thus, the activity of violence weakens and impairs precisely what it intends to maintain. (Leo Tolstoy)

A malignancy

Joy Gardner was born in 1963 in Jamaica to a 15-year-old mother. She never knew her father. When she was seven, her mother moved to the UK to work. Joy would not follow her mother until 1987, by which time she had a grown-up daughter of her own and was pregnant with her son. She had the boy, Graham, while in Britain and sought leave to remain to be with her mother but was refused. Although her mother was British, rule changes meant her adult offspring had no right to remain. A team of police and immigration officers arrived at her north London home on 28 July 1993 with instructions to deport her and her son to Jamaica. She was bound, gagged and restrained with a body belt. She collapsed, fell into a coma and died of asphyxiation.

In October 2005, Otto Ondawame from West Papua knocked on my office door. He was on the run from the Indonesian army's special forces unit Kopassus. Otto had protested the 1969 ‘Act of Free Choice’ when 1,026 West Papuans were held at gunpoint and ordered to vote for integration with Indonesia. Ondawame had committed a serious crime by raising the flag of his country and in 2001 had protested when the West Papuan leader Theys Eluay was found with his throat cut. Together with colleagues, I protected Otto during his years of exile and study in Australia. The Australian Department of Immigration eventually deported him to Vanuatu, where he died in 2014.