More than $17 million in compensation has been paid in the past five years to detainees who have been unlawfully detained in immigration detention or suffered injuries while in detention, with more than 60 cases pending

The figure does not capture all legal expenses or the ongoing medical and psychological care costs for injured detainees - a figure also estimated to be in the millions.

The compensation figures since 2007 coincide with a rise in the number of deaths in immigration detention. There have been 16 deaths since 2007 of which six were suicides, six are still awaiting determination by a coroner and four were natural causes.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Immigration said although all of the compensation payouts, bar one, are for detainees who were in the system before the original Rudd government came to power. She said many of the claims that are ongoing relate to incidents that occurred between 2000 and 2005.

But legal experts are foreshadowing fresh claims and figures from the Department of Finance show that in the 2010-11 year there were 16 new claims lodged and in 2011-12 there were two new claims. The department could not get approval to release the numbers for this year.

However, with record numbers of people in detention, lawyers predict a new wave of claims including from the Indonesian boys who crewed some of the boats and were jailed as adults.

A spokesman for the Australian Lawyers Alliance, Greg Barnes, said he had seen an increasing number of cases this year, and the federal government is in an untenable situation.

''I would expect that children who have been kept in detention will make claims, because it is abundantly clear that the minister has an obligation to put the best interests of the children first,'' he said.

'There is no court that will say the children should be kept in detention, so there is a breach of duty of care. There is going to be a tail of these claims … through the next decade.''

George Newhouse from Shine Lawyers, who acted for Cornelia Rau and deported Australian citizen Vivian Alvarez Solon, who are believed to have received $2.6 million and $4.5 million respectively for wrongful detention, said it is inevitable there will be more claims.

''If the government is going to keep people in toxic conditions within detention then they must establish dedicated mental health centres to deal with the resulting damage,'' said Mr Newhouse.

Some of the biggest payouts in the past few years include one to an Iranian man, who came to symbolise the debate over asylum seekers during the Howard government era when he sewed his lips together. Parviz Yousefi, 40, was awarded compensation of more than $800,000. He had attempted suicide four times after authorities separated him from his wife and son at Woomera detention centre.