Last month marked one year since the Victorian, New South Wales and Queensland governments missed the deadline to meet Australia’s obligations to the United Nations anti-torture protocol, the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture (OPCAT).
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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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No one should be subjected to abuse in prisons and places of detention. Yet cruel and degrading treatment is all too common in prisons and police cells across Australia. The UN’s anti-torture treaty, the Convention Against Torture and the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture (OPCAT), are designed to end the mistreatment of people behind bars.
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Strip searching is carried out routinely in Australian prisons, despite the availability of non-invasive alternatives. Strip searches rob people of their dignity and can be traumatising for survivors of abuse. The Human Rights Law Centre advocates for an end to the use of routine strip searching in Australian prisons.
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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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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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People are innocent until proven guilty, and bail means that the police can release a person from custody on the promise that they will go to court at a later date to face the charges alleged against them. If a person applies for bail and that application is denied, they are detained in prison until their court date.
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Recently, a report tabled in the Victorian Parliament by the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission uncovered serious and systemic wrongdoing in Victorian prisons.
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Routine strip searching involves forcing children as young as ten to remove their clothing in front of adult prison guards on a regular basis.
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Laws currently being considered by the Tasmanian government would allow the practice of routine strip-searching of kids to continue. If it’s the government’s intention to enact laws that protect kids, rather than cause them more harm, this opportunity to finally get the law right shouldn’t be squandered.
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Solitary confinement is a cruel practice that causes irreparable harm to the people who are subjected to this form of physical and sensory isolation. Governments must ban the archaic and inhumane use of solitary confinement in Australian prisons.
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Australia and the world face a public health emergency in coronavirus (COVID-19), but little has been said about the people in our prisons and youth detention centres.
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In response to the COVID-19 public health emergency, most states across Australia declared a state of emergency and brought in new laws imposing severe restrictions on civil liberties and an increase in policing powers.
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While politicians say that police are committed to taking a "sensible approach", history has shown that too often marginalised groups are disproportionately punished through an expansion of policing powers. In particular, people living with a disability, women escaping family violence and those experiencing homelessness may be hardest hit. In addition, increased powers - and police discretion - open the way for racialised and discriminatory policing, too often experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
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Kids should not be in prisons, and they definitely should not be in prisons right now.
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Prisons are fundamentally at odds with the notion of rehabilitation. On the brink of tears, a 19-year-old locked up in Port Phillip Prison recently asked me: "How can I think about tomorrow when I can barely survive today?"
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Our justice system is supposed to represent the best of us: principled, fair, equal and incorruptible. Underpinned by centuries-old common values that bind and protect us all. But 2018 has exposed a chasm between what is officially said, and what is officially done.
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Australian Governments must prohibit the solitary confinement of children in detention and closely regulate practices that can result in the forced isolation or segregation of a child. So what is solitary confinement?
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