SYDNEY Australia leads the world in the resettlement of refugees despite vehement international criticism of its treatment of asylum seekers, Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock said Tuesday.

Australia had now overtaken Canada as the world's most generous recipient of refugees on a per capita basis, Ruddock told journalists in Sydney.

He also rejected criticisms of the government's policy of despatching asylum seekers intercepted by the Australian Navy to offshore holding centers on Pacific islands while their claims for sanctuary were assessed.

The minister's comments followed an assessment by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) which revealed Monday that 147 of 529 asylum seekers sent by Australia to Nauru qualified as legitimate refugees.

Australian immigration officials have also assessed as legitimate 164 of 194 applications for refugee status among detainees on papua new guinea's manus island and on Nauru.

However, just seven of 292 Afghan asylum seekers have been successful thus far, AFP reported.

Ruddock warned that "if you are of the view that Australia should have anything to apologise for... think again".

"We have the largest per capita refugee resettlement program in the world."

He said those asylum seekers interned in Papua New Guinea and on Nauru under the government's so-called Pacific solution "who are found to be refugees do not automatically get a resettlement outcome."

Otherwise, the nine countries who accepted asylum seekers recognised by the UNHCR would be faced with resettling some 14 million people from around the globe between them.

The urgency of resettling those who qualified as refugees but remained interned in Papua New Guinea and Nauru was mitigated by the fact they no longer faced the immediate risk of persecution, the minister said.

Nauru, a tiny Pacific state with a population of around 12,000, is being paid by the Australian government under the Pacific solution to keep 1,118 asylum seekers in a purpose-built detention center.

More than 1,000 people still held in Papua New Guinea and Nauru are yet to be assessed.

Ruddock hailed the Pacific solution as a success, given that no asylum seeker vessels had breached Australian waters for five months.

Without its implementation late last year, the rate of illegal entry to Australia by asylum seekers paying Indonesian-based people smugglers to ferry them here would have resulted in up to 12,000 such arrivals annually, Ruddock said.

He said Australia would accept some, but not all of, the offshore detainees designated by the UNHCR as refugees.

Negotiations are believed to be continuing with New Zealand, Sweden and Ireland about accepting others.

"Inevitably, people who are not refugees will go home one way or another," Ruddock said, adding that Afghanistan's interim government had signalled conditions in the war-torn country were sufficiently safe for refugees to return.

"The idea that Afghanistan for the generality of Afghans is unsafe is untrue," he said, despite a UNHCR statement on Monday appealing for host countries not to "return Afghans on an involuntary basis until June at the earliest".