Amouk Majok, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Mobility, approaches the podium at the end of her open-borders tour. The trip has taken her from Geneva to Lesvos, Melilla, Johannesburg and El Paso. Now, jetlagged and exhausted, she gauges the crowd at Nauru’s Museum of the Migrant. They are mostly international journalists, a handful of mid-level foreign policy dignitaries, and a group of Australian school children accompanying their Prime Minister, Yao Chung.
The man sitting on the podium to Amouk’s right is the human rights activist Ibrahim al-Attar, who, as a boy, spent a year in the Nauru detention centre. He is there to acknowledge Prime Minister Chung’s official apology for intercepting boats carrying refugees and for placing migrants in offshore camps.
