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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It is neither fair nor just to continue caging children in youth prisons.
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$7 phone calls should not keep families apart. But mothers and fathers cannot afford to call their children, and siblings and friends cannot maintain crucial social connections.
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The Albanese Government must take action to fix its unfair social safety net and address the gap in life expectancy.
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The dark, secret walls of prisons create an environment where mistreatment is rife.
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26 January is not a day to celebrate.
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Thanks to the tireless advocacy of the Day family, public intoxication has been decriminalised in Victoria. People who are identified as intoxicated in public will be supported to go to a safe place, like a sobering up centre, instead of being locked in a police cell under criminal or civil police powers.
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The Human Rights Law Centre supports all elements of the Uluru Statement from the Heart – the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution, Treaty and Truth-telling.
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First Nations people must work until they're 67 before getting the pension, just like white people. But we have a much lower life expectancy.
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Victoria has some of Australia’s most dangerous and discriminatory bail laws that are disproportionately impacting Aboriginal women and women experiencing disadvantage. The Human Rights Law Centre is advocating with partners for the Victorian Government to implement reforms to make Victoria’s bail laws fair.
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The Human Rights Law Centre is advocating to change regressive bail laws across the country that are driving up the number of unsentenced people in prison. These dangerous laws are not making the community safer, instead, they are increasing the overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in prisons and targeting women experiencing disadvantage.
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The Human Rights Law Centre is supporting the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA) in their intervention in the coronial inquest into the police-shooting death of Warlpiri and Luritja teenager Kumanjayi Walker. The Human Rights Law Centre is assisting NAAJA to highlight systemic injustices experienced by Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, including systemic racism in policing.
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Children do not belong behind bars. Yet across Australia, children as young as 10 can be charged by police and locked up in prison. Due to systemic injustice, this is disproportionately impacting Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander children. The Human Rights Law Centre is a founding member of the #RaisetheAge campaign which seeks to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to at least 14 years old Australia wide.
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The Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, the Human Rights Law Centre and proud Wakka Wakka man Dennis brought a legal challenge in the Federal Court. The case called for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to be able to access the age pension earlier, to account for the gap in life expectancy.
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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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