Australian Immigration Detention like 'Torture'

Australia's immigration detention system was a toxic environment akin to torture, according to the chief psychiatrist for asylum-seekers for the past three years, a report said Tuesday.

Doctor Peter Young, until recently the mental health director for the company which provides care for immigration detainees, claimed detention was deliberately harsh to coerce people to return home.

"We have here an environment which is inherently toxic," he told The Guardian Australia.

"It has these characteristics in it which, over time, reliably cause harm to people's mental health. We got very clear evidence that that's the case."

Australia's hardline immigration policies -- designed to stop would-be refugees from risking their lives on people-smuggling boats -- involves mandatory detention for those arriving by such means.

Under a tightening of the policy last year, those arriving on unauthorized boats are refused resettlement in Australia, even if found to be genuine refugees, and resettled in Papua New Guinea and Nauru.

Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has disputed claims of a cover-up of mental health problems at the offshore asylum-seeker camps, and urged people not to jump to conclusions while a Human Rights Commission inquiry is underway.

His office did not respond to Young's comments on Tuesday.

Young, who last week gave evidence to the inquiry, accused the government of creating a system designed to produce suffering and create a negative mental state among detainees.

"If we take the definition of torture to be the deliberate harming of people in order to coerce them into a desired outcome, I think it does fulfill that definition," he said.

He told The Guardian about one-third of Australian immigration detainees on the mainland, the remote Indian Ocean territory of Christmas Island, and Pacific camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, had a significant level of mental health disorder.

"The longer people stay in detention, the higher the risk that those symptoms will develop into something which is a recognizable psychiatric diagnosis," he said.

In official figures current at July 31, some 1,127 asylum-seekers were on PNG's Manus Island and 1,146 on Nauru. A further 355 had voluntarily returned to their home nations since mid-September.