The Australian government's indiscriminate policies against human smuggling led to the unlawful incarceration of minor asylum seekers over the past four years, according to a new report issued on Friday by the Australian Human Rights Commission.

By its overzealous implementation of border protection measures, Canberra violated the basic human rights of as many as 180 underage Indonesians from 2008 to present.

Speaking to reporters in Sydney today, Human Rights Commission president Catherine Branson blamed the Gillard Government's almost blind dependence on wrist x-rays to determine the age of refuges intercepted while attempting to enter Australia.

Such method has been long discredited, Ms Branson said, as she conceded that "there is no technique available to determine precisely someone's chronological age."

"But we can fairly assess there must have been a significant number of those who are under age at the time who were treated by Australia as though they were adults," the commission chief was reported by the Australian Associated Press (AAP) as saying on Friday.

Majority of those illegally detained, the report said, were kept under custody for at least two years with the additional sufferings of staying behind bars with adults, Ms Branson said.

The report, however, noted too that 15 young Indonesians have been released so far by the government and another 50, who were facing charges, were cleared of any wrongdoing.

Ms Branson stressed that Canberra's basic fault was overlooking "the very fundamental principle in convention of the rights of the child ... is that if there is a doubt about whether someone is a child, they should be treated like a child."

If such were observed, then trampling the rights of the refugees, who legally were children when they were plucked out from their native country, could have been avoided, the commission report.

It would have been a lot helpful if federal authorities mulled over on the likelihood that many of the refuges were poor and uneducated young villagers from fishing communities and were forced into the situation by unscrupulous people smuggling syndicates, the report said.

Ms Branson strongly called on Prime Minister Julia Gillard to amend the country's Crimes Act in order to do away with the wrist x-ray method in establishing the real age of apprehended suspects, which is chief of the 17-point recommendations laid out by the human rights commission in the report.

In a response, Attorney-General Nicola Roxon issued assurances that changes have been instituted and in fact, a fresh system is now in effect that will ascertain "minors do not belong in adult jails, which is why the government significantly changed age-determination policy last year."

She added that authorities have commenced weaning away from the wrist x-ray technique to decode the real age of refuges under the care of the Australian government.

"Age determination is not an exact science but this government has demonstrated a clear commitment to improve processes in this area," Ms Roxon told AAP on Friday.