Human rights must be at the heart of Australia’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We are at a pivotal moment in history. The actions we take today are crucial to keeping people safe during this crisis and to shaping the country that emerges on the other side.

The Human Rights Law Centre is working to make sure communities that could be hit hardest – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, refugees and people seeking asylum, people behind bars, people with disabilities, and women – are not unfairly burdened with this crisis.

We are also working to ensure our governments are responding appropriately, fairly and in a way that promotes, rather than undermines, human rights and democracy for years to come.

We are working closely with Aboriginal partner organisations across Australia to ensure inequalities and injustices are not compounded during this pandemic. 

Ongoing systemic discrimination means that when Governments give police sweeping new powers, and when prisons and youth justice facilities are COVID-19 tinderboxes, it is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ health and liberty that are most at risk. We’re advocating for early release of children and adults from prisons, for a moratorium on low level prosecutions, and for safeguards against the misuse of police powers. 

Likewise, we have worked closely with Northern Territory Aboriginal organisations on urgent measures to reduce the risk of the COVID-19 crises devastating remote communities. Together we’ve halted the discriminatory roll-out of the Government’s cashless debit card and convinced the Government to suspend its exploitative work-for-the-dole program. We will continue this work to ensure the Government does not return to discriminatory programs and instead supports social security measures that promote a decent standard of living.

Everyone deserves to be safe in the face of COVID-19, but the Federal Government is placing refugees and people seeking asylum at unacceptable risk in immigration detention facilities in Australia are creating unacceptable risks. 

People in detention facilities remain among the most at risk of contracting COVID-19. This is because detention facilities are densely populated and people held there have no choice but to share bedrooms, bathrooms and other facilities, making physical distancing impossible.  

Without action to reduce the number of people in immigration detention, infectious disease experts and peak medical bodies have warned that it is only a matter of time until these places see outbreaks of COVID-19. The Human Rights Law Centre is continuing to advocate for the Federal Government to urgently reduce the number of people held in these facilities and ensure appropriate access to vaccinations.  

The Morrison Government is also still holding people in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, more than eight years after they were first sent there. Now, more than ever, the Government must act and bring people held on Nauru and PNG to safety before a COVID-19 outbreak occurs. We are working to ensure access to vaccines for these people and the end of the Government’s policy of offshore detention.  

We are working with decision makers, civil society groups and experts to ensure our democracy stays on track in these changing times. The decisions our governments are making right now will fundamentally shape our society and economy for years to come – we need our democracy to stand up, not shut down, during this crisis.

We are working to ensure governments across Australia put clear limits on laws that hand enormous power over to politicians and restrict our civil liberties. This includes ensuring all measures taken – like tracing apps and broadened police powers – are discussed openly and clearly with the public; that they are narrowly confined to what expert advice says is necessary, and independently reviewed.

We’re also working to ensure all elections go ahead in a way that is free, fair and safe, and that Parliaments around the country reconvene safely to ensure vital scrutiny and accountability.

When COVID-19 enters a prison, it can spread like wildfire and put lives at risk.  

Since the outset of the pandemic, together with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advocates, we have been calling for governments across Australia to keep everyone safe by reducing the number of people in prisons. 

Prisons are particularly high risk because they are closed, over-crowded environments. Prisons have always been abusive places and COVID-19 has compounded the dangers that people face behind prison walls. Overcrowding, substandard hygiene practices, poor healthcare services, and a population with underlying health conditions contribute to make prisons a risky place, particularly during a pandemic. 

It is not just people in prison who are at risk. A revolving door of workers enter prisons and return home to their families and communities each day, putting them at risk, too.  

We are now seeing the highly contagious Delta variant exploding in prisons across New South Wales and in Victoria. A year and a half into the pandemic, it is time our governments listened to expert advice, learnt from the experiences overseas and reduced the prison population, to reduce the risk of COVID-19 spreading.  

The risks posed by COVID-19 to people in prison extend beyond contracting the virus, and include the punitive steps taken in response. People in prison have been subjected to arbitrary 14 day quarantine and lockdowns that often amount to solitary confinement.  

We will continue to advocate for governments to responsibly release certain groups of people from prisons, such as children, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and people with chronic health needs, and call for governments to end the use of solitary confinement behind bars – both as a response to COVID-19 and more generally as a cruel and degrading prison practice. We will also push for particularly at-risk groups, such as people in prison, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People and people with disabilities to be vaccinated urgently and as a matter of priority. 

We will continue to use legal action where appropriate. You can read about our 2020 legal action in Victoria here where we helped a man in prison with acute health needs file an urgent injunction and argued for his release.  

We are calling on Australian businesses take responsibility for upholding the safety and rights of workers during the pandemic. This includes providing paid pandemic leave, ensuring workers have safe and flexible working conditions, honouring existing agreements and using their leverage to ensure that workers right down their supply chains are being properly paid and protected. Now is the time for companies to step up, not back, from their human rights obligations.

We are also calling on the Government takes urgent steps to protect better the rights of workers during the crisis, including extending measures such as Jobkeeper to all working people in Australia, regardless of visa or employment status and ensuring that corporate bailouts are accompanied by conditions to protect workers’ rights.

During the COVID-19 public health crisis, rates of family violence, reproductive coercion and unwanted pregnancies will grow. At the same time, the crisis is making access to reproductive healthcare more challenging, especially for women living poverty or in regional and remote areas. Travel restrictions have made it harder for women around Australia to access abortion services safely, and for doctors to deliver these services.

In South Australia, women and health professionals are being needlessly exposed to increased risk of COVID-19 because of medically unnecessary criminal laws that force women to travel, attend hospitals and see two doctors, rather than being able to access telehealth services like women around the rest of Australia.

We are working with experts to shed light on these issues and to pressure the South Australian Government to take action to ensure women can access telehealth abortion services without breaching criminal laws.

As a community, we’re at our best when values like fairness, respect and compassion guide our decisions and actions. The policy debates currently unfolding will have huge ramifications and set the political tone for years to come. That’s why we’ve been working to kick-start a public discussion about creating an Australian Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.

A Charter is about ensuring human rights are always at the heart of all government decisions, laws and policies. It’s about clearly listing and articulating all of our human rights and freedoms so that everyone from school kids to new Australians can understand their rights. Importantly a Charter also provides a powerful tool to challenge injustice and means if someone has their rights violated they can take action and seek justice.

We continue to lead Australia’s Universal Periodic Review NGO Coalition. Australia’s Human Rights Scorecard, released in early April, provides a baseline for monitoring the evolving impact of COVID-19 on human rights in Australia. We will provide an update to the Scorecard for submission to the United Nations in July, highlighting the new human rights challenges faced as Australia responds to COVID-19.

We are working with international NGOs to highlight the human rights challenges presented by COVID-19 globally and to ensure that UN human rights mechanisms, such as Human Rights Council and Special Procedures, can support countries like Australia in implementing human rights based responses to COVID-19, and hold them to account when they fail to do so.