Human rights advocates want action in response to the sixth-period review report, which found the Australian government’s treatment of refugees breached international law.
The Refugee Council of Australia’s (RCA) Paul Power issued a statement this week calling on the federal government to take notice of the first such report since Labor won office in May.
“It is well beyond time to heed the advice of the UN and reform Australia’s unlawful treatment of refugees and people seeking asylum,” Power said.
“We hope that the Albanese government will take UN Committee’s recommendations seriously and address long-standing international concerns about Australia’s breaches of international law.”
The United Nations Committee Against Torture report was published this month. The findings were based on a periodic review undertaken on 15-16 November, and concluding observations decided last week.
The document listed a series of concerns about the treatment of people held in immigration detention centres and subject to Australia’s offshore processing and turnback policies.
Mandatory detention, overcrowding, inadequate health care, including mental health care, and assault, sexual abuse, self-harm, ill-treatment and suspicious deaths are among the concerns highlighted in the report.
“The committee is particularly concerned about what appears to be the use of detention powers as a general deterrent against unlawful entry rather than in response to an individual risk, and the continued application of mandatory detention in respect of children and unaccompanied minors, despite the reduction in the number of children in immigration detention,” the report said, underscoring how Australia’s Migration Act 1958 mandatorily detains “unlawful non-citizens” until the person concerned is granted a visa or is removed from Australia.
Power said the report took an opposing view to Australia’s claim it was not responsible for people it placed in offshore detention, finding the government had legal responsibility because asylum seekers effectively remained under Australia’s control as they were transferred by officials “to centres run with its financial aid and with the involvement of private contractors of its choice”.
The committee urged the government to end offshore processing and transfer all people to Australia.
“[The committee] is also concerned about poor material conditions of detention in some facilities, the detention of asylum seekers together with migrants who have been refused a visa due to their criminal records, restrictions on access to social, education and health services, the high reported rates of mental health problems among migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in detention, which allegedly correlate to the length and conditions of detention, and the reported excessive use of force and physical restraint perpetrated with impunity by security guards, private service providers and members of the local community against migrants, refugees and asylum seekers,” the report said.
The committee added it was further concerned about what appears to be the use of detention powers as a general deterrent against unlawful entry rather than in response to individual risk, and the continued application of mandatory detention in respect of children and unaccompanied minors.
Detention laws and worries about pretrial conditions
The report warned federal legislators that harmonisation of laws in Australia faced challenges when bills concerning human rights were passed through parliament before recommendations from relevant parliamentary joint committees had been finalised. Without the benefit of the recommendations of these committee inquiries, the laws tended to be inconsistent or inadequate.
Australia’s various anti-torture laws were an example of this type of inconsistency, the report added.
“The committee is concerned that human rights-related bills are sometimes passed into law before the conclusion of review by the parliamentary joint committee and that the recommendations of the [inquiry] are not always given due consideration by legislators,” the report said.
In the case of detaining accused people in Australia before they faced trial, the committee also sounded the alarm over an “almost constant increase” in detainee figures with a reported increase of 16 per cent from June 2020 to December 2021.
The uptick was largely driven by increases in the rate of pretrial detention of indigenous peoples, the committee added.
The committee advised the Australian government to ensure retrial detention regulations were “scrupulously respected” and only ever used for limited periods in exceptional circumstances, taking into account the principles of necessity and proportionality.
“[The government] should also intensify efforts to significantly reduce the number of pretrial detainees by making more use of alternatives to detention, in particular with regard to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults and children, in accordance with the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for Non-custodial Measures (the Tokyo Rules) and the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Noncustodial Measures for Women Offenders (the Bangkok Rules),” the report said.
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