Human and animal rights travel in the same boat

This article was published in The Sydney Morning Herald 5 June 2011

It seems bizarre and even rather offensive to talk about asylum seekers and Australian cattle in the same sentence. But by a strange twist of events, Australia faces a similar problem with Asian neighbours in dealing with each of these issues

The difficulty boils down to this: at the end of the day, it is extremely hard and probably impossible to control what happens on the ground in certain countries, whatever rules might be put in place.

The government is still negotiating its ''people swap'' with Malaysia. But documents last week show that a core question - protection of the human rights of those Australia sends there - is proving difficult to tie down.