Jakarta – Indonesia on Sunday challenged Australia to prove that 43 boat people from troubled Papua province seeking asylum from Canberra are really fleeing persecution.

"It lays on the Australian government to prove that they are really being persecuted," said Indonesia's Foreign Minister Hasan Wirayuda. "The ball is in the Australians' court."

The Papuans, who included pro-independence activists and their families, arrived in northern Australia last month after a five-day voyage in an outrigger canoe.

They said they feared death if returned to Papua, where a sporadic and low-level separatist insurgency has been going on for decades.

The group was taken to an immigration detention camp on Christmas Island, a remote Australian territory in the Indian Ocean.

Wirajuda said Indonesia had already stated that the asylum seekers were not being persecuted in Papua and were not being sought by the authorities. Police had guaranteed they would not be harmed should they return home.

If Canberra decided to accord them asylum, he said, "Australia should have the conviction, beyond reasonable doubt, that they are people who are being persecuted because of their political or religious belief or their race.

"We do not want our relations with Australia, which have already developed well, to be disturbed by this problem," he added.

Papuans and human rights groups have accused Indonesian authorities of widespread abuses in the remote province, a former Dutch colony that Indonesia took over in the 1960s.

Indonesia won sovereignty over Papua, then called West Irian, in 1969 after the UN allowed an integration referendum with a public show of hands by a few hundred hand-picked tribal leaders. Critics labelled the vote a sham.