A group of asylum seekers who were rejected from resettling in Australia have arrived in Cambodia under a controversial new resettlement scheme.

The group, consisting of 3 Iranian and 1 Rohingya asylum seekers, were being held at a detention centre on Nauru by Australian authorities.

Through a scheme which has come under intense international criticism, the four were people volunteered to be resettled in Cambodia. The Cambodian government agreed to take them on in exchange for £20 million in aid.

Deputy director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch, Phil Robertson, said Australia was “throwing tens of millions of dollars at Cambodia to take these refugees, despite Cambodia’s recent record of ejecting asylum seekers from Vietnam and its threat to throw out even more if some other country doesn’t agree to resettle them”.

“These four refugees are essentially human guinea pigs in an Australian experiment that ignores the fact that Cambodia has not integrated other refugees and has already sent Montagnards and Uighur asylum seekers back into harm’s way in Vietnam and China,” he added. “Cambodia clearly has no will or capacity to integrate refugees permanently into Cambodian society.”

An Australian government spokesperson said that the country's Immigration Minister Peter Dutton would not be commenting on the situation.