Amnesty International has criticised Australia's border control policy as "shameful," urging countries "to reject the model of abuse".
"Instead of doing its fair share for the world's most vulnerable people, the Australian government is trapping thousands on remote islands and then promoting these abusive practices as a solution to the world," Graham Thom, refugee co-ordinator for Amnesty International Australia, said in the statement.
Since 2013, Australia has intercepted all asylum seekers travelling by sea and either turns their boats back or processes their claims offshore in places such as Papua New Guinea or on Nauru.
On Monday, during an address to the UN summit on migration, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull defended his Australia's strict border controls, saying that kind of control over irregular migration creates the "confidence" needed for governments to "mitigate risk and focuses humanitarian assistance on those who need it the most."
Mr Turnbull said every country needed to create its own border security measures, noting, "not every country is an island."
"The unregulated movement of people globally is growing fast ... We need measures to create order out of the resulting chaos if we are to provide safe pathways for refugees and target those who are most in need," he said.
But Thom said it was "absolutely shameful to see our prime minister stand on the world stage and champion the systematic abuse of thousands of women, children and men on remote islands as a model others should follow."
"This is completely the wrong pathway for the world to follow at a time with record global displacement." he said.
The Amnesty International statement also called on Australia to bring those in detention to Australia for processing and settlement and urged the government to increase its annual humanitarian refugee intake to 30,000.
