Australia has bowed to pressure from the United Nations and will not automatically send unaccompanied refugee children to Malaysia in its asylum-seeker swap, officials said today.

Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said children would be considered on a “case-by-case” basis for inclusion in the 800 arrivals to be sent away in return for Australia taking 4,000 approved refugees from Malaysia.

“It’s of course the case that we’ll need to consider the vulnerability of individuals and how we deal with those vulnerabilities,” Bowen said. “We have girls who may be 12 or 13 years old.”

Less than 24 hours earlier, Bowen had said it was crucial to the success of the policy that no arrivals be excluded from the deal.

“I don’t want children getting on boats to come to Australia thinking or knowing that there’s some sort of exception in place,” he said then.

The latest decision came after the United Nations High Commission for Refugees said it had changed its mind about supporting a deal that was announced May 7 but is yet to be signed.

“We are not able to lend our support to the text as it currently stands because of the absence of the operating protection safeguards we have been calling for,” commission spokesman Adrian Edwards said.

“UNHCR has always stipulated that one of our specific requirements with regard to the transfers is that protection safeguards are in place to protect vulnerable groups, especially unaccompanied

children.”

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has been attacked from inside her own Labor Party for the Malaysia deal.

“This is an appalling decision and I’m embarrassed,” Ben Wyatt, a member of the state parliament in Western Australia, said. “Labor has lost its way by now making the decision to brutalise and penalise children caught up in terrible circumstances of asylum.”

Wyatt was one of 14 state Labor members of parliament to sign a petition condemning the policy.

Refugees are a sensitive issue in Australia, where a record 6,900 illegal immigrants arrived by boat in 2010, mostly on rickety vessels from Indonesia and usually hailing from strife-torn Iraq, Afghanistan or Sri Lanka.

Likened to ‘Pacific Solution’

Canberra’s plan to ship arrivals to Malaysia has been likened by some commentators to the previous government’s “Pacific Solution” - under which boatpeople were held on remote Nauru and Papua New Guinea's Manus island.

Branded “inhumane” by human rights groups, the harsh policy was repealed by Gillard’s centre-left Labor Party in 2007.

- Agencies