An urgent complaint has been made to the United Nations about Australia’s discriminatory youth justice systems and how they seriously violate the human rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.
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The Human Rights Law Centre calls on all parties and independents at the 2025 Federal Election to put human rights at the heart of government decision making and improve the dignity, equality, and fair access to justice for all people in Australia.
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The Queensland Crisafulli Government’s latest legislation, the Making Queensland Safer Act 2024 (Act), substantially changes how children are treated by Queensland’s police, courts and prisons, including by making prison sentences significantly longer. The Queensland Government concedes that the changes are ‘more punitive than necessary to achieve community safety’ and ‘in direct conflict with international law standards’. ¹
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No child should ever grow up in a prison cell. Children belong in schools and playgrounds. Funnelling children into prisons does not make communities safer, it undermines them.
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For years – to justify spending billions of dollars on prison expansion – governments across Australia have parroted the line that prisons support “community safety”. This premise is false.
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Whilst the special treatment experienced by the British and their descendants ensured their prosperity, the special treatment our people experienced entrenched our disadvantage, economic and social exclusion, poor health outcomes and shorter life expectancy.
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Prisons are Covid-19 tinderboxes and now we have seen case numbers connected to prisons across NSW explode. You couldn’t get a more dangerous breeding ground for the virus - indoors, poor ventilation, lack of sanitation, overcrowded with little ability to physically distance.
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Achieving human rights progress can be hard. It can take years and sometimes decades of advocacy, campaigning, strategy, suffering and sacrifice. Sometimes all that effort comes to nothing. Sometimes things go backwards despite our best efforts. Sometimes change happens, but the pace is far too slow.
Read MoreIt’s easy for many of us living in a country like Australia to take our human rights for granted. For most of us, most of the time, Australia is a great place to live.
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Social security is a vital safety net that most people in Australia will turn to at some point in their lives. In this context, the 2019 federal election offered two very different futures for remote communities in the Northern Territory.
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We need to rethink a system that is funnelling people into harmful prisons as the default response, writes Shahleena Musk.
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It's 2017 and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are again fighting against the systemic denial of fair pay for work. When people talk about stolen wages — the slavery-like system that saw Aboriginal people denied any or equal pay for hard work over decades — they typically speak of the past. But the pervasive and poisonous tentacles of systemic racism in Australia are very much of the present.
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How children could be left to languish in solitary confinement; how the abuses in Don Dale went unchecked for so long before journalists and advocates exposed a system rotten to its core.This Friday Australia will be provided with answers.
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Mandatory sentences are not the right tool for reducing crime, writes our Executive Director, Hugh de Kretser, following the misguided policy announcement from Victoria's Opposition Leader.
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On the eve of a fresh Supreme Court challenge to stop the Andrews Government keeping young people in Barwon prison, a 17-year-old offender has revealed the toll of being in the State’s most secure adult jail.
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To achieve the Close the Gap measures, the federal and territory governments need to engage in genuine dialogue with Aboriginal people. The chronic crisis of overcrowding can only be addressed through a collaborative approach, with a view to ultimately giving control back to Aboriginal communities.
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Just a day after Victoria’s highest court confirmed the government acted unlawfully in detaining children at the Barwon adult prison, the Minister has tried yet again to keep them there. The government is spending extraordinary resources defending the indefensible – jailing children in the state’s most notorious adult prison.
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Brutal images of Aboriginal women and children being mistreated in custody are a defining feature of 2016. From Dylan Voller and the young detainees of Don Dale to Ms Dhu, Australians have been forced to reckon with the cruel reality of Australia's over-imprisonment crisis.
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