PAPUA NEW GUINEA – The company that has taken over the management of Australia’s offshore immigration detention regime has been warned by international law experts that its employees could be liable for crimes against humanity.

Spanish infrastructure corporation Ferrovial, which is owned by one of the world’s richest families and the major stakeholder in Heathrow airport, has been warned by professors at Stanford Law School that its directors and employees risk prosecution under international law for supplying services to Australia’s camps on Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, the Guardian reports.

“Based on our examination of the facts, it is possible that individual officers at Ferrovial might be exposed to criminal liability for crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute,” said Diala Shamas, a clinical supervising attorney at the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School.

“We have raised our concerns with Ferrovial in a private communication to their officers and directors detailing our findings. We have yet to hear back.”

Shamas said her colleagues’ findings should be a warning to any company or country seeking to replicate Australia’s refugee policies elsewhere.

“One of the things that we and our partners are concerned about is the timing of all of this,” said Shamas, who also worked in conjunction with the Global Legal Action Network.

“As states move to tackle increasing migration flows, and amid reports that Australia’s offshore model is something that other states in Europe might look to replicate, and the possibility that other companies will be enlisted in those efforts – we set out to examine the potential serious consequences of that kind of involvement.”

Ferrovial acquired responsibility for the offshore detention contract in May after buying more than 90 per cent of Broadspectrum, the company managing the camps. Ferrovial has said it will not bid for a new contract after the current one expires in February 2017.

But campaigners accuse Ferrovial of acting too slowly to end its relationship with the camps.

Shamas’s legal warning came as a new report released on Monday by rights advocacy group No Business In Abuse (NBIA) and the Melbourne-based Human Rights Law Centre said: “Even one day of business in gross human rights abuse is too much.”

The report advises Ferrovial to immediately cease all operations at the two camps, and urges its financiers and shareholders to withdraw their support for the Spanish company if it refused to do so.

The report accuses dozens of European and North American banks and investors of complicity in Australia’s offshore detention regime because of their financial backing for Ferrovial.

“Ferrovial’s investors and financiers must uphold international business and human rights standards by rejecting their current association with the gross human rights abuses,” NBIA’s report said.

In response to queries from the Guardian, Ferrovial said: “Respectfully, but strongly, we rejected the factual and juridic allegations contained in it.”

Ferrovial also said it would not be renewing its contract with the Australian government next year and noted that it was a signatory to various human rights commitments – and pointed out that many of the alleged abuses at the camps predated Broadspectrum’s involvement.

The company also argued it does not “run” the camps, but merely provides a considerable number of services, and highlighted how the Australian high court has upheld the government’s right to detain asylum seekers in offshore sites.

Australia’s offshore detention centres have attracted widespread and consistent criticism since the country re-introduced its policy of “offshore processing” in 2012.

Currently, people who arrive in Australia by boat without a visa seeking asylum are sent to either Nauru or Manus Island, where most are held in indefinite, arbitrary detention. They are told they will “not, under any circumstances, be settling in Australia”, but there are no other viable resettlement options for them.

The United Nations has found that Australia’s immigration detention regime breaches international law, amounting to arbitrary and indefinite detention, and that men, women and children are held in violent and dangerous conditions.

Several arms of the UN have repeatedly condemned Australia’s offshore regime, including the UN high commissioner for human rights, the UN committee against torture, the UN special rapporteur on torture, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, and the UN high commissioner for refugees.

NBIA executive director, Shen Narayanasamy, told the Guardian that Ferrovial’s complicity in the abuses on Nauru and Manus was “incredibly cut-and-dried under international law”.

- Guardian