A Charles Sturt University (CSU) law and human rights expert has urged both major parties to show genuine leadership on asylum seeker policy during the Federal election campaign.

"It should not be in a race to the bottom whereby the policy that does most harm to refugees wins the headlines," said Associate Professor Alison Gerard, who leads the University's law program based at CSU in Bathurst.

"Australia's offshore detention centres are a key platform in Australia's migration and border management policies. They aim to deter boat arrivals, but only have mixed success, and incubate serious physical and mental health issues.

"Not only are these policies harsh, but the rhetoric from government ministers are inflaming passions against detainees.

 "The policies announced by both major parties do not address the fears for the safety and security of refugees detained in Australia's offshore detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island (in Papua New Guinea).

"The security and safety of detainees in off-shore detention centres has been called into question, particularly after the death of Mr Reza Berati, a 23 year-old Iranian, on Manus Island in February 2014," Professor Gerard said.

In the past month, the Australian Border Deaths Database has reported two deaths in the Nauru centre. The most widely reported was that of Omid Masoumali, a refugee who set himself alight on 27 April this year to protest his ongoing detention on Nauru.

Professor Gerard said offshore detention centres have come under sustained criticism from human rights groups including the Australian Human Rights Commission, Amnesty International, and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

"The Australian funded offshore detention centre on Manus Island was recently declared unconstitutional by the Papua New Guinean Supreme Court and operations there and the future of around 1 000 asylum seekers and refugees are now under a cloud," she said.

"The Papua New Guinea Supreme Court found that the Manus Island Detention Centre operations were a breach of the constitutional right to personal liberty."

In a recent book chapter entitled 'Lethal violence and legal ambiguities', Professor Gerard and CSU PhD student Tracey Kerr argued that deaths in custody demonstrate the harms of offshore detention policy.

"We believe that asylum seekers deserve to be treated with dignity, and deaths in immigration detention are deaths in custody that need proper investigation and accountability," Professor Gerard said.

"Australia cannot claim that legal ambiguities prevent it from taking responsibility for what occurs in offshore detention centres."