WASHINGTON — About 1,200 immigrants who have sought shelter in Australia are being kept in inhumane conditions on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean to deter other refugees and asylum-seekers from entering the country by boat, human rights advocates contend.
In a damning report issued Tuesday, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch asserted that most of these men, women, and children have been in a detention center on the island of Nauru for several years, held in ‘‘prisonlike’’ conditions in which many have been abused, neglected, and denied proper medical care for often serious conditions.
The advocacy groups say that the Australian government has ignored the ‘‘appalling abuse’’ — sending a clear message to any others who are considering coming to the country.
‘‘In my experience there is no other developed country that I can think of who has pursued this course of conduct with people who are fleeing persecution, who are seeking freedom, who are accused of no crime,’’ Michael Bochenek, Human Rights Watch Children’s Rights Division senior counsel, told CNN. ‘‘There is no parallel for this.’’
He said he visited Nauru as a researcher but did not tell Australian authorities what exactly he was working on.
‘‘What I found on Nauru is what I can only describe as a deliberate, systematic abuse,’’ Anna Neistat, Amnesty International’s senior director of research, told Australia’s ABC News. In a statement, Neistat said that ‘‘Australia’s policy of exiling asylum-seekers who arrive by boat is cruel in the extreme.’’
Officials in Australia denied the accusations but did not speak further about them.
‘‘We would strongly encourage Amnesty International to contact the department before airing allegations of this kind,’’ a spokesman for the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection told CNN. ‘‘The department strongly refutes many of the allegations in the report.’’
Researchers with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch spent nearly two weeks on Nauru, interviewing 84 immigrants on the small island more than 2,700 miles from Australia in the Pacific Ocean.
The refugees and asylum-seekers fled from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, among other countries, according to the researchers’ report.
The joint report states that for nearly four years, Australia has been ‘‘forcibly transferring’’ the refugees to the island under an agreement with the Republic of Nauru to house them at the Australian government’s expense.
The immigrants recently told the human rights advocates that they have spent years waiting for salvation.
Children said they had been bullied at school. Their parents said they had been beaten and robbed.
Six women said they had been sexually harassed or assaulted.
‘‘We are always scared, all the time,’’ one woman told the researchers. ‘‘I am always checking the door to see if it is locked. We can’t go out alone.’’
