Once again, Australia has made international headlines for its treatment of refugees in offshore detention camps.

On Tuesday, 2,000 separate ‘incident reports’ leaked to The Guardian revealed the disturbing and previously unknown extent of abuse allegations on Nauru.

The 8,000 pages included detailed allegations of sexual abuse, assaults and attempts at self harm on the island.

More than half the reports (51 per cent) were related to children, despite children making up only 18 per cent of the detention centre population.

An editorial in the Globe and Mail on Wednesday.

On Thursday, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton responded to the leak by warning against “hype” and alleging many of the complaints were made up.

“Some people have even gone to the extent of self-harming and people have self-immolated in an effort to get to Australia. Certainly some have made false allegations,” he told 2GB radio.

Secrecy has been a main criticism of Mr Dutton’s immigration system, but now the world is watching.

Australia savaged overseas

Amnesty International’s Senior Director of Research Anna Neistat said the leak revealed “a system of ‘routine dysfunction and cruelty'”.

An article in The New Zealand Herald.

“The Australian government has engaged in one of the most successful mass cover-ups I’ve witnessed in my career of documenting human rights violations. They’ve repeatedly said this kind of abuse has not been going on. They’ve been lying.”

American news site CNN described the reports as “distressing” and a “devastating catalog of self-harm attempts, violent altercations, hunger strikes and incidents of sexual assault and child abuse”.

CNN ran a photo gallery of the 68 children held on Nauru.

On Wednesday, The New York Times ran the Nauru story – and not for the first time.

“While the difficult conditions in the island nation have long been known, the documentation will give new evidence to opponents of Australia’s policies toward asylum seekers,” wrote the Times.

Human Rights Watch Director Elaine Pearso told the paper “Australia’s policy of deterrence is premised on making people in offshore locations suffer”.

This comes months after the paper – one of the world’s most respected mastheads – ran a full-length op-ed titled “Australia’s offshore cruelty”.

The article criticised the “secrecy” of Australia’s Border Security laws, which it said masked the “dehumanisation” and “cruelty” suffered by asylum seekers, who were labeled “illegals without cause”.

“Scrap a policy that shames a nation with its pointless cruelty,” wrote the Times.

The Times piece came in the same month a 23-year-old Iranian died in a Brisbane hospital after self-immolating on Nauru.

Across the pond, the BBC reported: “The secretiveness of the Australian and Nauruan governments about conditions at the centre has led to complaints from the media and human rights groups.”

In an August 3 article titled ‘Australia asylum: why is it controversial?’, it said “Australia’s hard line on immigration is unlikely to change”.

Further reports from The Irish Examiner, TIME, Aljazeera, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, The Independent, ITV News, The International Business Times and The New Zealand Herald confirmed the reality that Australia’s detention program is well and truly on show.