David Cameron should confront Australia over Nauru asylum detention centre

Walking a lap of the North Pacific island of Nauru would take you three and a half hours. One kilometre inland, you would glimpse the republic’s phosphate mines. Living hundreds of kilometres from anywhere must sometimes feel like incarceration for the 10,000 or so Nauruans. What makes the republic seem even more prison-like is the way it is used by Australia as a detention and processing facility holding over 800 mostly Iranian asylum seekers. As fellow Commonwealth members, we should be concerned about this dot in the Pacific, and the way that Australia is off-shoring facilities there.

Nauru is used by Australia to distance itself from the human face of its asylum problem. Last month it emerged that a pregnant diabetic woman with two young children was being held at a processing centre comprising no more than a group of tents.