Report: Australia failed to protect asylum seekers

The Australian government failed in its duty to protect asylum seekers at a camp in Papua New Guinea where a riot left one dead and 69 injured, according to a parliamentary report released on Thursday.

Iranian Reza Barati was killed in the riot at the Manus Island detention center in February as tensions flared among inmates about their fate under Australia's hard-line asylum seeker policies.

The Australian Senate's legal and constitutional affairs committee branded the violence "eminently foreseeable", and said it was mostly caused by delays in processing refugee claims.

"It is clear from evidence presented to the committee that the Australian government failed in its duty to protect asylum seekers including Mr. Barati from harm," the 188-page report concluded.

"The committee has found that the events ... were eminently foreseeable, and may have been prevented if transferees had been given a clear pathway for the assessment of their asylum claims."

Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said the death of Barati was "tragic and terrible".

But he added that the report had been used by the opposition Labor and Greens parties, whose members dominate the committee, to "whitewash their own failures in government".

"The coalition government inherited a center on Manus Island which was underfunded and incomplete, and resettlement arrangements were little more than a blank sheet of paper," he said.

Two members of the six-person senate committee who are part of the ruling conservative coalition rejected the report's findings, blaming the previous Labor government for the problems at Manus Island.

A separate independent review on behalf of the Australian government released in May found that Barati was "brutally beaten" to death by a Salvation Army worker, and warned of a major task to rebuild trust.

However, it added that no particular factor caused the violence at the camp, which has been condemned as too harsh by the United Nations. PNG police in August charged two men over Barati's death.

Manus Island houses one of two remote Pacific camps used by Canberra in its tough offshore detention policy. The other is on Nauru.

A total of 2,151 asylum seekers are held at the facilities, according to immigration figures to Oct 31.

Under Canberra's immigration policy, asylum seekers arriving by boat are transferred to the centers for processing. If their asylum application is successful, they are permanently resettled outside Australia.

(China Daily 12/12/2014 page11)