In the wake of the High Court ruling on offshore detention, we have seen the rise of a new civil disobedience movement - not fronted by dreadlocked youths, but by the middle-class establishment of doctors and clergy, writes Miriam Cosic.

It's not the usual suspects, dreadlocked youth chanting in the streets and waving placards. It's the middle-class establishment - doctors and clergy - who are now engaging, not merely in protest, but in active civil disobedience.

Civil disobedience is reasoned refusal to comply with state laws on moral grounds. This is not America in the segregated '50s. Or a Latin American police state in the '70s. Or the USSR pre-glasnost. This is Australia in 2016.

Think about it. It has been illegal for Australian doctors to speak up about child abuse in certain places since the Australian Border Force Act, passed last May, made it a criminal offence for anyone working directly or indirectly for the Department of Immigration and Border Protection to reveal anything at all about conditions in detention centres, including Nauru and Manus Island.

Every doctor in the last eight months who has warned about gross harm being done on our watch to children, women and men, many already suffering post-traumatic stress disorders, has risked prosecution and a two-year jail sentence.

Lawyers' appeals to international law, to the right to claim asylum, to the illegality of refoulement, to the terms of international conventions to which we are signatory, to the moral basis of their opposition, have had no effect on the Federal Government - or on the Opposition, which shares bipartisan policy on offshore detention. Nor have protests from the United Nations, Amnesty International and other human rights organisations.

Nor have private activists' tweets, posts, demonstrations and sit-ins at ministers' electoral offices had any effect. Pictures of elderly and well-known protestors being dragged away by police may have galvanised the left, but probably just caused the majority of Australians who support both boat turn-backs and offshore detention to roll their eyes.

Two days ago, the High Court raised the stakes when it affirmed the Australian Government's right to operate offshore detention centres. Under Australia law, the government can detain people in foreign locations. That Kafkaesque scenario evokes Guantanamo Bay, with the modification that our high-security detention centres are reserved, not for people believed to be plotting war and engaged in terrorism, but for people fleeing war and persecution and coming to us to beg for help.

That ruling - with Justice Michelle Gordon dissenting, it must be recorded - paved the way for 267 people, including 37 babies whose pictures have been all over the media since, several children already in school here, and women who have suffered sexual abuse, to be returned to Nauru.

On Thursday, 10 Anglican and Uniting Churches across the country joined the ranks of civil disobedience, following the lead of the Anglican Dean of Brisbane, Dr Peter Catt, who has declared St John's Anglican Cathedral a place of sanctuary.

Historically, as Dr Catt pointed out, churches have offered sanctuary to those fleeing violence and persecution. Traditionally, the forces of the state would respect church autonomy - which is why we react with heightened shock to the regular news that terrorists kill worshippers in their mosques. And here in Australia today? Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has put the churches on notice that everyone is expected to obey the law.

Dr Catt spoke calmly yet eloquently on Radio National's breakfast programme. He said it had become imperative that the Government separate the issue of boat turn-backs from offshore detention. He also said that he would obstruct any police action to remove an asylum seeker who accepted sanctuary - a synonym for asylum - in his church, even if he risked arrest.

Asked whether it was appropriate that churches should become politicised in this way, he replied simply: "The Gospel is political." It was a brilliant riposte, in advance, to those members of Cabinet who vaunt their Christianity and support aggressive policies towards asylum seekers at the same time. Later in the day, he responded to Government warnings by saying he hoped that authorities removing asylum seekers from a church would at least leave their weapons at the door.

There is a long tradition of moral concern for distant others in the Western philosophical tradition. Kant wrote that it "has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere." That was in 1795, fully 200 years before "political correctness" became a jibe against respect and compassion.

The flight of Jews from occupied Europe and the massive international effort of settling many millions of displaced persons after WWII, redefined international obligations, which were then codified in the 1951 Refugee Convention. That cosmopolitan impulse is being stifled today in the panic caused by mass flight from war in the Middle East.

Some will always resist. Abolitionists helped black slaves escape America to Canada via the Underground Railroad in the 19th century. Conscientious objectors followed that route when they resisted the draft in the 1960s. Blacks and whites joined the ANC - then considered a terrorist group - in South Africa during apartheid. Danes managed to ferry most of its Jewish citizens to neutral Sweden during WWII. More controversially now, activists from the Red Brigades in Italy to the Black Panthers in the US broke the law in pursuit of political aims.

Things have quietened since neo-liberalism became the dominant paradigm, however, and the radical action movement has been defeated, not with repression, but with a strategic campaign of derision and shrugs all round.

The rise of Bernie Sanders in the US, of Syriza in Greece, and others challenging the paradigm suggests that people are beginning to see through it. In Australia, the paediatricians and reverends standing up to laws they consider immoral suggest that there is a line that people with formal ethical responsibilities to society will not cross.

Dr Catt said yesterday that those first churches' action was only the beginning, and he expected many more to join them. "This is a fledgling movement," he said. When ministers of religion call for civil disobedience in a liberal democracy, you know something is seriously morally amiss.

Miriam Cosic is a journalist and vice-president of Sydney PEN.