SYDNEY, March 5 (Islamonline & News Agencies) – Amnesty International’s secretary-general, Irene Khan, arrived in Australia Tuesday, March 5, for a five-day visit to examine grave human rights' violations in immigration detention camps.

She said Australia’s human rights reputation was being undone by its reluctance to submit itself to scrutiny by the United Nations and its treatment of indigenous people and asylum seekers.

"It's important that Australia continue to behave in a way in which it can live up to its previous reputation," Khan said, quoted by Agence France-Presse (AFP).

She said she would investigate immigration detention policies, the so-called Pacific Solution and the impact of border protection laws.

Khan hoped to tour the Woomera Detention Center in the South Australian desert, which was the scene of riots and hunger strikes in January, but has not yet been granted access. 

There have been dozens of protests in Australia's six detention centers for illegal immigrants in the last six months as detainees lose patience with the long delays in having their claims processed.

Since last August, the authorities have intensified their efforts to discourage illegal immigration by intercepting boatloads of asylum seekers before they reach Australia. 

They are shipped to the Pacific islands of Nauru and Papua New Guinea to have their claims assessed there. 

Prime Minister John Howard has refused to see Khan, said AFP, but the head of Amnesty hopes to hold talks with the Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock and the Attorney-General Daryl Williams.

Meanwhile, Iraqi detainees in Papua New Guinea have accused the Australian Government of using them for political gain.

They have written a letter to the Australian media from the detention center on Manus island.

The Iraqis accuse the Government of painting them as terrorists and criminals.

A spokeswoman for Ruddock said the department had a copy of the letter and would respond later in detail.

Human rights lawyers also announced they planned to sue the company running Australia's detention centers in an American court, using a 200 year-old U.S. law.

University law lecturer Fernad de Varennes, one of a number of Australian and American lawyers involved in the action, said the group would claim Australian Correctional Management (ACM), under the direction of the Australian Federal Government, violated human rights.

An application will be lodged with a federal court in Florida within the next few weeks.

"We will submit that this prolonged detention constitutes prolonged arbitrary detention as is prohibited in human rights and international human rights," de Varennes told ABC radio, according to AFP.

"Secondly, that the overall conditions in a number of the detention centers ... constitutes cruel or unusual treatment or punishment.

"Individuals outside the U.S. can go to a federal court if their basic rights under international law has been violated outside the U.S. This law was initially used to deal with situations like piracy."

De Varennes said the Australian Government could only be named as a joint defendant in the claim because it was immune from U.S. prosecution.

He said if the Florida court found the ACM had breached human rights, it could order the company to pay detainees millions of dollars in damages. 

For many weeks, Australia has rebuffed foreign critics of its treatment of asylum-seekers with a characteristically robust mixture of condemnation and disdain. However, it has faced biting charges from the country’s own Human Rights Commission.

In his first intervention on the disgrace of Australia's detention camps, the commissioner, Sev Ozdowski, said that the government was flouting its international human rights obligations in at least one of its camps. Specifically, he said, the Woomera detention center, which has been at the center of much recent criticism, violated the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the British daily newspaper, The Independent, reported February 7.

The Woomera camp, he said, was imbued with "a culture of despair... Children are witnessing violence [and] consequently they think about self-harm." 

Two commission officers spent five days at Woomera in January and found what Ozdowski called "a culture of despair". They recorded 12 cases of self-harm by children within a fortnight, including three who slashed themselves with razor blades, one carving the word "freedom" into his forearm, and one who tried to hang himself.

Ozdowski said children were suffering psychological damage and families were becoming dysfunctional. Nine children had been in Woomera for more than a year, he said, and more than 70 for longer than six months. Only children under 12 were given even cursory schooling. Asylum-seekers granted refugee status received only temporary three-year visas.

Papua New Guinea, a partner in Australia's so-called "Pacific solution" of dumping unwanted migrants on impoverished neighboring nations to have their asylum claims assessed, also turned out tragic.

Thanks to the efforts of a few dedicated lawyers and refugee advocates who were allowed into Woomera, the desperate measures taken by the mainly Afghan inmates – some of whom drank detergent and sewed their lips together – received international attention.

But the plight of detainees on Papua New Guinea's remote Manus Island has been shrouded from the public gaze. 

According to officials in Port Moresby, the capital, detainees have been denied access to independent legal advice, on Canberra's instructions.

The asylum-seekers on Manus – who were joined early February by another batch of 144 – are not only in despair; they are, according to doctors at the nearby Lorengau Hospital, suffering from potentially fatal diseases, said The Independent. Doctors say that at least 15 inmates, including several children, have malaria, and say some – if not all – are likely to have contracted it on the island. Others are suspected of having typhoid and tuberculosis.

The Australian authorities have denied the existence of any cases of malaria. 

Mary Robinson, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, is one person not satisfied by the government's account of its treatment of refugees. She requested permission to send an envoy to Woomera to investigate conditions. There were, she said, "very serious human rights concerns that I would like to have clarified".

Australia's own human rights watchdog, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, accused the government of violating international conventions governing the welfare of children in respect of 236 young people incarcerated at the camp.

When Robinson spoke to Alexander Downer, the Foreign Minister, he told her that the government's hardline stance had widespread domestic support. Her response to him, she said, was that "human rights is not about whether it's popular or not".

There has been mounting criticism of Australia's asylum policy, which was condemned by the aid agency Oxfam. The Booker prizewinning author Peter Carey called it "morally repugnant", while another renowned novelist, Thomas Keneally, expressed similar sentiments when he addressed a rally in Sydney.