Australia violated rights of asylum seekers held in Nauru, UN watchdog says

UN Human Rights Committee ruling covers cases involving 25 refugees who endured years of arbitrary detention.

The Australian government violated a human rights treaty by detaining a group of asylum seekers, many of them minors, on the remote Pacific island of Nauru, even after they were granted refugee status, a United Nations watchdog has ruled.

The UN Human Rights Committee said Australia violated two provisions of the legally binding 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – one on arbitrary detention and one protecting the right to challenge their detention in court.

“A state party cannot escape its human rights responsibility when outsourcing asylum processing to another state,” committee member Mahjoub El Haiba said in a statement on Friday following Thursday’s ruling.

The UN watchdog’s ruling covers two cases involving 25 refugees and asylum seekers who endured years of arbitrary detention in Nauru.

The panel of 18 independent experts found that in both cases Australia violated the rights of refugees, including minors who received insufficient water and healthcare.

The refugees and asylum seekers from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar were intercepted while trying to reach Australia by boat in 2013, when they were aged between 14 and 17 years old.

Under Australia's hardline policy introduced in 2012, the government sent thousands of refugees attempting to reach the country by boat to offshore processing centers in Nauru and Papua New Guinea's Manus Island