and Manus Island, although Australia since refused to carry out the deal. Conditions in Malaysia’s overcrowded immigration detention centres were harsh. One thousand people, including over 400 Rohingya – who had been stranded off Malaysia’s coastline until the authorities agreed to accept them in May 2015 – endured prolonged detention for over a year in harsh conditions. In June, the majority of the Rohingya were released and some were resettled. Thailand’s lack of legal framework, processes or procedures for hosting refugees and asylum-seekers left many vulnerable to arbitrary detention and other violations of their rights. In the absence of a recognized legal status under Thai law, refugees and asylum-seekers, including children, continued to be treated as irregular migrants and under the Immigration Act could be detained indefinitely in immigration detention centres, which might not meet international standards of detention. Scores of Rohingya from Myanmar were among those detained in immigration centres, having been held since their arrival by boat in 2015. The Indonesian authorities engaged in crude intimidation tactics in Aceh, including by endangering the lives of a group of over 40 Sri Lankan Tamil asylum-seekers – among them were a heavily pregnant woman and nine children – by firing warning shots and threatening to push them back out to sea, in violation of international law. DISCRIMINATION Tens of thousands of people from Myanmar’s Rohingya minority fled northern Rakhine State, where security forces mounted reprisal attacks in response to an assault on three border outposts which killed nine police officers in October. The security forces, led by the military, randomly fired at villagers, torched hundreds of homes, carried out arbitrary arrests, and raped women and girls. Villagers were placed under night curfews and humanitarian agencies were barred from the area. The response amounted to Amnesty International Report 2016/17 collective punishment of the entire Rohingya community in northern Rakhine State and may have amounted to crimes against humanity. Many Rohingya refugees and asylum-seekers who made it to Bangladesh in desperate need of humanitarian assistance were pushed back into Myanmar. The crisis arose in a context of unrelenting and severe discrimination against the Rohingya community, in which a number of rights including freedom of movement remained restricted. There was also continuing religious intolerance – exacerbated in recent years by the previous government’s failure to effectively investigate violent incidents – often fuelled by hardline Buddhist nationalist groups and directed particularly against Muslims. The Indonesian authorities often appeared to be more concerned about hardline religious groups than respecting and protecting human rights. For example, the Governor of Jakarta, the capital, a Christian and the first member of Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese community to be elected to that position, underwent a criminal investigation on suspicion of “blasphemy”. Discrimination against LGBTI people increased after officials made inflammatory, grossly inaccurate and misleading statements. In Papua New Guinea violence against women was widespread and sex workers were beaten, raped, arbitrarily detained and killed without recourse to justice. They were not adequately protected largely because of laws criminalizing sex work, the stigmatization of sex work and social and cultural norms. The UN Human Rights Committee and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child criticized New Zealand’s high rates of incarceration, child poverty and domestic violence of Indigenous Māori. Sexual and other physical violence against women and girls also remained widespread despite wide recognition of the problem and efforts to address it. 39