SYDNEY -- A U.S.-based human rights group accused Australia on Tuesday of committing widespread abuses against people seeking asylum in the country.

Human Rights watch said Australia's practice of detaining asylum seekers on remote island camps without access to legal aid was a breach of its international obligations to protect refugees.

In a 94-page report released to mark International Human Rights day, the group also assailed Australia's practice of granting temporary visas to some would-be refugees and then forcing them to reapply for asylum when the visas expire.

"Such a policy is contrary to all accepted state practice and to UN guidance on reserving temporary protection for use in mass influx situations," it said AFP.

It was the first time the New York-based human rights watch has issued a report on Australia. Since its founding in 1978, the international monitoring group has released 1,100 reports on rights abuses worldwide.

Tuesday's report, titled "By Invitation Only": Australian asylum policy, was the result of an eight-month investigation into Canberra's treatment of thousands of would-be refugees who arrived, mostly by boat, in late 2000 and 2001.

The conservative government of Prime Minister John Howard responded to the flood of boat people -- primarily from Afghanistan and Iraq -- with a policy of refusing them entry to the country and detaining any who could not be forced away.

In what the government termed a "pacific solution" to the crisis, Australia funded the creation of detention centers in Papua New Guinea and Nauru.

It has also built camps on remote Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean and at Woomera in the south Australian desert.

Human Rights watch said the asylum seekers face "abuses of arbitrary detention, lack of due process in asylum procedures and denial of family reunification" in the camps.

The group also said it had obtained evidence that the Australian defense forces beat and abused asylum seekers on board boats intercepted in October 2001, a charge denied in an Australian probe into the incidents.

While it has issued "temporary protection visas" to a small percentage of the asylum seekers, Australia has rejected most on the grounds either that they no longer face danger at home or arrived via third countries which were safe and should be obliged to take them in.

Australian procedures were described as arbitrary.

"Human rights watch found that many asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Iraq were still at risk in the countries through which they passed, such as Jordan or Indonesia," it said.

"You can't say one group of refugees is more deserving than another, just because of how they arrived," said Rory Mungoven, global advocacy director for human rights watch. "That's the Australian government's game, but it's not international law."