Australian anti-refugee policies criticized

This video says about itself:

Report: Severe abuse of Australia’s asylum seekers in Nauru

2 August 2016

CORRECTION: 04/08/2016: This report states that Amnesty International and HRW were granted rare access to processing facilities in Nauru. In actual fact, while the groups were on the island, they were not granted access to processing facilities.

A new joint report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International has found evidence of severe abuse towards hundreds of people seeking asylum in Australia.

The men, women, and children who were forcibly transferred to the remote Pacific island nation of Nauru to have their asylum claims processed, said they have suffered inhumane treatment and neglect.

Al Jazeera’s Jonah Hull reports.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Australia: Oz island refugee camps cruel in the extreme

Thursday 4th August 2016

AUSTRALIA was accused by human rights groups yesterday of deliberately ignoring the abuse of asylum-seekers held at the remote Nauru detention facility in the Pacific to deter future refugees.

A scathing joint report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International said that detainees on the island, where Australia sends asylum-seekers, are routinely denied critical medical care, frequently attempt suicide and endure physical assaults by locals.

“Australia’s policy of exiling asylum-seekers who arrive by boat is cruel in the extreme,” said Amnesty International senior research director Anna Neistat.

“Few other countries go to such lengths to deliberately inflict suffering on people seeking safety and freedom.”

Australia’s Department of Immigration and Border Protection criticised the two groups for not consulting the government while preparing the report and said it “strongly refutes many of the allegations.”

The department did not, however, respond to a request about exactly what it was refuting.

Australia refuses to accept any asylum-seekers who attempt to reach its shores by boat, preferring to pay Nauru and Papua New Guinea to hold them, often for years.

Reports of abuse, miserably hot and crowded living conditions and frequent suicide attempts at the detention camps have circulated for years.

Human rights groups have consistently called on Australia to abandon its offshore detention policy, calling the practice a violation of the country’s international human rights obligations.

A report published this week by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch further exposes the deliberate violation of the human, democratic and legal rights of about 1,200 men, women, and children who have been detained on the remote Pacific island of Nauru for more than three years after seeking asylum in Australia: here.