Australia's human rights commissioner Graeme Innes is urging the Federal Government not to use the new immigration detention centre on Christmas Island.
A boat carrying 44 suspected asylum seekers was found off the Western Australian coast near Broome on the weekend, the sixth boat detected in Australian waters in the past two months.
Mr Innes says regardless of the numbers arriving in Australia the new centre, which remains unused, is inhumane and too isolating.
"My message is not to treat asylum seekers as prisoners because they're not, and to not put them in a forbidding prison-like centre which the new centre is and keep them in the old facility," he said.
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