Melbourne – Jakarta has failed to renew a key agreement that allowed Australian and Indonesian police to cooperate directly on stemming the flow of illegal immigrants to Australia, according to a report here yesterday.

The Age newspaper said senior police officers in Jakarta saw the agreement as putting too much responsibility on the National Police. Indonesian police chief Brigadier-General Dadang Garnida told the newspaper that the way police cooperated on dealing with illegal immigrants in the future would depend on talks between Jakarta and Canberra.

Jakarta plans to hold an international summit, possibly next month, on the so-called boat people problem, which involved mostly Middle Eastern and South Asian asylum seekers arranging for boat trips to Australia from Indonesia.

Gen Dadang said Indonesian police would still cooperate closely with Australian police, but instead of being able to deal directly with each other, cooperation would be on a government-to-government basis.

Meanwhile, the head of Indonesia's navy said yesterday that every refugee boat encountered in its waters should be allowed to continue to its destination. "We cannot arrest them, but we can allow them to continue their journey according to their destination country because it is their basic human right," the Navy Chief of Staff, Admiral Indroko Sastrowiryono, was quoted as saying by the state Antara news agency.