The government of the northeastern Australian state of Queensland has stunned human rights experts by suspending the Human Rights Act for the second time this year in order to detain more children.
The ruling Labor Party last month introduced a series of laws that will allow under-18s – including children as young as 10 – to be detained indefinitely in police watchhouses, due to changes to youth justice laws – including prison sentences for young people who violate bail conditions violate – means that there is no longer enough space in designated youth detention centers to house all those behind bars.
The amended bail laws, introduced earlier this year, also required the Human Rights Act to be suspended.
The moves have shocked Queensland’s Human Rights Commissioner Scott McDougall. He called human rights protection in Australia “very fragile” because there are no laws that apply nationwide.
“We don’t have a National Human Rights Act. Some of our states and territories have incorporated human rights protections into legislation. But they are not constitutionally enshrined so that they can be overridden by parliament,” he told Al Jazeera.
The Queensland Human Rights Act – introduced in 2019 – protects children from detention in adult prisons, so it had to be suspended before the government could pass its legislation.
Earlier this year, the Australian Productivity Commission reported that Queensland had the highest number of children in detention of any Australian state.
Between 2021 and 2022, the so-called “Sunshine State” recorded an average of 287 people in youth detention every day, compared to 190 in Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales, the second highest.
And despite the cost of more than 1,800 Australian dollars ($1,158) to detain each child for a day, more than half of detained children in Queensland are re-sentenced for new offenses within 12 months of their release.
Another report released by the Justice Reform Initiative in November 2022 found that youth detention rates in Queensland had increased by more than 27 per cent in seven years.
The push to detain children in police guardhouses is seen by the Queensland government as a means to accommodate these growing numbers. A guardhouse, attached to police stations and courts, contains small, windowless concrete cells and is normally used only as a “last resort” for adults awaiting court hearings or who need to be locked up by police overnight.
However, McDougall said he has “real concerns about irreversible harm being done to children” held in police guardhouses, which he described as a “concrete box.”
“[A watch house] there are often other children in there. There will be a toilet that will be visible to almost everyone,” he said.
“Children do not have access to fresh air or sunlight. And there have been reported cases of a child who was held in a guardhouse for 32 days and whose hair fell out. After two to three days in a waiting house, a child’s mental health will begin to deteriorate. After eight, nine or ten days in the guardhouse, I have heard countless reports of children collapsing during that time.”
He also pointed out that 90 percent of detained children and youth were awaiting trial.
“Queensland has an extremely high percentage of children in detention held on remand. So these are children who have not been convicted of a crime,” he told Al Jazeera.
‘Police and cages’
Despite Indigenous people making up just 4.6 per cent of Queensland’s population, Indigenous children make up almost 63 per cent of prisoners.
The incarceration rate for Indigenous children in Queensland is 33 times higher than for non-Indigenous children.
Maggie Munn, a Gunggari person and national director of First Nations justice organization Change the Record, told Al Jazeera that the decision to detain children as young as 10 in adult waiting homes was “fundamentally cruel and wrong.”
“It is incredibly worrying that for the second time this year, the Queensland Government has suspended human rights laws to punish children, the majority of whom are First Nations children. What does that say about the human rights that our government values?” Munn told Al Jazeera.
“I worry about these children, what they will be exposed to, how they will be treated and the harm and trauma they will face as a result of this administration’s blatant disregard for their rights.”
Munn said alternative solutions are needed that address children’s behavior without subjecting them to a process that could cause more problems.
“There have been countless opportunities for this administration to pursue alternatives to incarceration that focus on the child, understanding their behavior, addressing them and holding them accountable outside the prison cell, and yet these solutions and alternatives continue to be ignored.”
An additional risk to human rights protection is the Queensland Parliament, which unusually has only one house. Without a House of Lords to scrutinize legislation, the ruling party can pass new laws relatively unchallenged.
Debbie Kilroy, CEO of Sisters Inside, an independent community organization based in Queensland that advocates for the human rights of women and girls in prison, said that in such a system the ruling party “can really do anything it wants, at any time.” without any form of supervision. checks and balances.
“And that is what they have done for the second time this year by passing the most appalling laws that will perpetrate violence and harm against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in particular, not just today, tomorrow, next month, but for the coming generations. ,” she said.
![Exterior of Brisbane Youth Detention Centre. It's a big blue sign near a fence](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/9357451-1694764910.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C535)
Kilroy also told Al Jazeera that the government should stop funding “police and cages” and raised concerns about what she described as the “systemic racism, misogyny and sexism” of the Queensland Police Service.
In 2019, police officers and other staff were recorded joking about beating and burying black people and making racist comments about African and Muslim people.
The recordings also included sexist comments and an officer joking about a female First Nations inmate providing sexual favors.
The conversations were recorded in a police guardhouse, the same detention centers where Indigenous children can now be held indefinitely.
Australia has repeatedly come under fire internationally over the treatment of children and young people in the criminal justice system.
The United Nations has repeatedly called on Australia to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 years to the international standard of 14 years, with the issue again highlighted in the country’s 2021 Universal Periodic Review at the Human Rights Council.
The Queensland Labor government’s suspension of human rights protections – which disproportionately affects Indigenous communities – also comes as their federal counterparts campaign for a referendum on Indigenous rights.
If the referendum is successful, there will be a constitutional creation of an Indigenous advisory council within the federal parliamentary system, known as a ‘Voice to Parliament’, a signature Labor policy.
“It is sheer hypocrisy on the part of the government to pass these cynical, racist laws while simultaneously campaigning for the Voice to Parliament,” Queensland Greens MP Michael Berkman told Al Jazeera.
“And unfortunately, there is nothing in the Voice proposal that would reverse these changes or deter an equally callous administration from doing the same.”
Mark Ryan, Queensland’s minister for police and corrective services, and Di Farmer, Queensland’s youth justice minister, did not respond to requests for comment.
However, Ryan – who introduced the legislation, which expires in 2026 – is unrepentant and defends his decision last month.
“This government makes no apologies for our tough stance on youth crime,” he said in a number of Australian media reports.