(Transcript from World News Radio)
There are calls for the federal government to immediately suspend transfers of asylum seekers to the Manus Island detention centre in Papua New Guinea.
It follows the unrest at the facility earlier this week in which left an Iranian man dead, and left dozens of other asylum seekers injured, some seriously.
Santilla Chingaipe has the details.The federal government says PNG authorities are investigating the unrest, and the Department of Immigration is carrying out its own review.
The Australian Greens say the government should suspend the transfer of asylum seekers to the Manus facility.
Greens immigration spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young has told the A-B-C, the suspension should be in place until the outcome of the Immigration Department inquiry is known.
"I find it quite disturbing that the Minister has not ruled out sending more people to Manus Island while the inquiry is ongoing and after the horrors of this week."
David Manne from the Melbourne-based Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre agrees.
"The reality is, that it is Australia that has come up with these arrangements whereby people are sent to a place as dangerous as Manus Island, and it is Australia that's paid for it (the centre). So fundamentally, although Australia may transfer people to Manus Island, it cannot transfer its moral and legal responsibility for the fate of those people."
David Manne says many of the asylum seekers are experiencing the same sort of conditions on Manus that they have fled from.
"The reality is that many people seeking asylum in Australia flee in fear of arbitrary detention, brutal abuse or death, and these are the forms of inhumanity which are happening now on Manus Island. It is untenable to continue to send people there and it is in fact untenable to hold people there or to allow them to remain because as we've seen there are such severe forms of inhumanity."
Amnesty International is one of few groups that have been given access to visit the Manus facility since Australia began sending asylum seekers there.
Spokesman Graeme MacGregor says overseas processing of asylum seekers should be permanently stopped.
"When we visited in November and saw conditions inside the facility it was claer that the facility was massively overstretched, under-resourced and overcrowded. And the idea of sending even more asylum seekers there particularly given what's happened this week I think is completely unacceptable."
Graeme MacGregor says the federal government has not yet responded to recommendations made by Amnesty after its November visit.
"The fact is we don't know. We met with the Minister face to face in December, and shortly after our meeting where we presented him with our report and our recommendations, he committed publicly on television to making improvements to the facility where possible. But since that time, in the two months since he made that commitment, we have been given no information about what improvements have been made and unfortunately this unnecessary and unjust veil of secrecy is being maintained by the government, particularly this week we feel that that's inappropriate."
Prime Minister Tony Abbott has ruled out closing the Manus centre.
"The Australian government will not be deterred or intimidated by anyone when it comes to doing what we need to do to protect our borders. We will not succumb to pressure, to moral blackmail. We will ensure these camps are run fairly, if necessary firmly."
But Amnesty's Graeme MacGregor says if no changes are made, there could be a repeat of this week's deadly unrest.
"I think it's actually inevitable that if nothing is done to address the problems that resulted in this violence, we will see it happening again."
