Immigration Minister Brendan O'Connor has released a statement affirming Australia will continue to return failed asylum seekers to Sri Lanka after a damning report of the country's detention centres by Human Rights Watch.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) claimed widespread rape of detainees during the separatist conflict that ended in May 2009, and said politically motivated sexual violence by the military and police has continued.
The report, coinciding with the UN Human Rights Council sessions in Geneva, gathered accounts of 75 cases of alleged rape and sexual abuse between 2006 and 2012 in both legal and "secret" detention centres in Sri Lanka, HRW said.
Today, The High Court in London has blocked the deportation to Sri Lanka of a group of failed Tamil asylum-seekers on the basis that repatriation is too dangerous.
But Minister O'Connor says the federal government does not return asylum seekers without assessing any claims for protection against up-to-date country information.
