Australia Defends New Refugee Policy, Despite Riot SYDNEY, Australia - Senior Australian officials rushed Sunday to defend a tough new policy aimed at curtailing the record number of people attempting the dangerous boat journey to claim asylum in the country, following a riot at an offshore refugee-processing center and the arrival of the first vessel that will be subjected to the new policy. Every year, thousands of asylum seekers pay smugglers to ferry them in often unsafe, overcrowded vessels to Christmas Island, a remote Australian territory in the Indian Ocean that is its nearest point to Indonesia. Australia has struggled for more than a decade to deter them from attempting the potentially deadly journey. Under the policy announced Friday by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, all asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat are to be sent to refugee-processing centers in Papua New Guinea, which like Australia is a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention. That announcement appears to have been a factor in a riot Friday at an Australian-run detention center on the Pacific island nation of Nauru. A spokeswoman for the Australian foreign ministry told The Associated Press on Sunday that the riot had caused damages worth an estimated $55 million, and led to the arrest of 125 asylum seekers. Foreign Minister Bob Carr and Attorney General Mark Dreyfus were among the senior Australian officials making the rounds of Sunday morning talk shows to defend the policy. "'I think the position of the vast majority of the Australian people is that, subject to some room for judicial oversight and review, it is the executive government backed by the Parliament that ought to make the final decision on whether people be processed on Australian soil or somewhere else,'" Mr. Carr told Sky News. The first opportunity to test that proposition arrived Saturday in the form of a ship carrying 81 asylum seekers that was intercepted by the Australian Navy. Tony Burke, the immigration minister, said that the passengers would be sent to Papua New Guinea if they decided to proceed with their asylum claim. But the decision to send potential refugees to Papua New Guinea, a politically unstable country suffering from what some experts have called an epidemic of violence, particularly against women and children, has already raised serious ethical and legal questions. David Manne, a prominent human rights lawyer who succeeded in blocking a similar proposal in 2011 to process migrants in Malaysia, declined to speculate on the likelihood of a legal challenge over the boat intercepted Saturday. He did, however, assert that Papua New Guinea was ill-equipped to protect the asylum seekers. "'The sad reality is that P.N.G. is an extremely unsafe place,'" he said in an e-mail exchange Sunday. 'There can be no assurance that refugees will be given the protection they're entitled to, and there is every prospect they will not be protected.' A decade ago, under Prime Minister John Howard, asylum seekers were transported to nearby island nations for a lengthy processing intended to remove the incentive for claiming asylum on Australia's shores. Mr. Rudd abandoned the policy when he became prime minister for the first time in 2007, which led to an explosion in the number of arrivals. In 2012, Prime Minister Julia Gillard opened new offshore detention centers in Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, but they lacked the capacity to handle the deluge of new arrivals and did little to discourage them.