Australia rejects torture claims

AUSTRALIA – The Australian government has rejected the Amnesty International report arguing Australia’s offshore detention regime is a form of torture.

Amnesty’s senior research director Anna Neistat, who travelled to Nauru for five days in July, accused Australia of deliberate abuse and overseeing a system of neglect and cruelty.

The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, told ABC radio on Tuesday morning he did not believe conditions in offshore processing amounted to torture. “I reject that claim totally, that is absolutely false,” the prime minister said. “The Australian government’s commitment is compassionate and strong.”

Turnbull acknowledged there were sad stories on Nauru but indicated the government would not be dissuaded from its harsh policies to deter boat people. “There are 1200 people from whom we can never hear because they drowned at sea,” he told ABC radio. The secretary of the Immigration Department, Mike Pezzullo, told a Senate estimates hearing that offshore processing was “part of a broader policy of deterrence” but that “the idea that the Australian government, presumably with the complicity of Nauru and PNG are knowingly engaged in a programme of torture is something that I reject categorically”. “I refute categorically that we flout any laws international or otherwise. And as to the notion, inference, implication that we use torture as some sort of instrument of state policy, I personally find that to be offensive.

“I understand both the legal as well as philosophical definition of torture and that is not a practice that’s been engaged upon at all.” - PNC