Submission to the Universal Periodic Review of Australia

Introduction

1. Human Rights Watch submits the following information regarding Australia's implementation of recommendations it accepted through its 2021 Universal Periodic Review (UPR), as well as information about developments in the human rights situation in Australia not addressed in the 2021 review. This submission is not a complete review of the implementation of all recommendations, nor is it a comprehensive review of Australia’s protection of human rights in the domestic sphere.[1]

2. The submission covers human rights concerns monitored by Human Rights Watch, including treatment of asylum seekers, Indigenous peoples’ rights, children’s rights, disability rights, older persons rights, and human rights and the environment, as detailed below.

Human rights legislation 

3. During the 2021 UPR, Australia said it was committed to ensuring its international human rights obligations were implemented in domestic law.[2]
4. Australia does not have a national human rights act or charter.[3] In May 2024, a parliamentary inquiry into Australia’s human right framework found that while there is some protection against human rights violations in existing laws, there is an inadequate “piecemeal approach.” The inquiry recommended enacting a national Human Rights Act.[4]

Recommendation:

• Legislate a national Human Rights Act that implements into domestic law all of Australia’s obligations under international human rights law.

Asylum seekers and refugees

5. During the 2021 UPR, Australia supported recommendations to ensure that its refugee and asylum seeker policies are compliant with international law.[5] It noted multiple recommendations that called for ending the offshore processing of asylum seekers.[6]
6. During the 2021 UPR, Australia claimed that the offshore processing of refugees in Nauru and Papua New Guinea (PNG) was the responsibility of those governments.[7] However, in January 2025, the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Committee found Australia remained responsible for the arbitrary detention of asylum seekers redirected or transferred to offshore detention facilities in Nauru. The Committee found Australia had violated its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), including article 9(1), which guarantees the right to be free from arbitrary detention.[8]
7. Despite the Committee finding, the Australian government continues to violate the rights of asylum seekers and refugees who attempt to arrive by sea by continuing to forcibly transfer them to Nauru. As of January 2025, there were 91 people who had been transferred to Nauru by Australia for offshore processing.[9]
8. As of June 2025, about 37 male refugees,[10] some with children and partners, remain in Papua New Guinea more than a decade after Australia first forcibly transferred them there. Australia’s Manus Island detention center was closed after the PNG Supreme Court in 2016 found it breached constitutional guarantees of personal liberty.[11]
9. Refugees who have attempted to arrive by sea are denied the opportunity to be settled in Australia[12] and instead spend years, sometimes decades, living in uncertainty in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, often with inadequate health care and safety risks. At least 14 people have died after being detained in Australia’s offshore processing system[13] including after being murdered by guards,[14] through medical neglect,[15] and by suicide.[16]
10. Australia introduced a blanket rejection in 2014 on resettling refugees who have registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Indonesia.[17] Prior to 2014, Australia was the biggest resettlement country for refugees registered in Indonesia.[18] Indonesia is not a party to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, and refugees living there do not have work authorization.
11. Australia maintains a “turn-back” policy of intercepting boats of migrants, including those who are seeking asylum, and summarily turning them to the high seas or returning the people onboard to countries of departure or origin. A report released in March 2025 by the Commonwealth Ombudsman found two seagoing vessels that may be used by the Australian Defence Force (ADF) to detain people at sea were not in line with Australian and international human rights standards. [19]
12. Migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers detained in Australia’s onshore processing centers also have been subject to serious rights abuses. On May 31, 2025, there were 1023 people detained in domestic immigration facilities.[20] The average person detained had been held for more than one year and 66 people had been detained for more than five years.[21]
13. In November 2023, Australia’s high court found the government’s practice of indefinite immigration detention to be unlawful under the constitution.[22] Following the ruling, the government introduced new laws that expand the country’s offshore detention regime and allow officials to pursue prison terms for people who resist deportation, including asylum seekers.[23] The laws allow Australia to pay third-party countries to “resettle” non-citizens. In February 2025, the government announced it had reached a deal with Nauru to “resettle” three non-citizens who had been released from immigration detention following the 2023 high court ruling.[24]
14. In February 2023, the government permitted 19,000 refugees who had spent 10 years on temporary protection and safe-haven enterprise visas to apply for permanent residency.[25] However, the decision excluded about 7,000 asylum seekers who had their protection claims rejected under the now abolished “fast track assessment” process, limiting their rights.[26]

Recommendations:

• Close offshore processing centers and immediately evacuate refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants remaining in Papua New Guinea and Nauru to Australia. Process all asylum seeker claims in a thorough, impartial, and transparent manner in Australia.
• Abolish “boat turn-backs,” acknowledging that the Refugee Convention provides that people seeking asylum may need to violate immigration rules to reach safety and should not be penalized for doing so. Allow asylum seekers who arrive by boat to be eligible to apply for permanent protection visas.
• Provide pathways to permanent protection visas for the 7,000 people who had their protection claims rejected under the now abolished fast-track process.
• Revoke laws passed in November 2024 that violate the rights of refugees and asylum seekers.
• End Australia’s blanket refusal to resettle refugees registered in Indonesia.

First Nations child removals

15. In its 2021 national UPR report, Australia said it was committed to eliminating the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care. Since then, rather than being “eliminated,” the overrepresentation of First Nations children in out-of-home care has worsened.[27] In 2023, First Nations children were over 12 times more likely to be in care than non-Indigenous children, compared to 10 times in 2021.[28]
16. Human Rights Watch has documented the removal of Aboriginal children from their families by authorities in the state of Western Australia.[29] Western Australia spends the least of any state or territory on family support programs. Human Rights Watch found Western Australia had removed children from mothers fleeing domestic violence and from parents without adequate housing, rather than providing appropriate services.
17. Human Rights Watch found in some cases that authorities had treated poverty, including homelessness, as neglect that warranted child removal. Most of these families were dependent on social security payments. Research has found that Australia’s current social security payments are inadequate to cover the cost of housing.[30]
18. Parents often lack legal representation in care and protection proceedings, in which courts decide on issuing protection orders and placing children in out-of-home care.

Recommendations:

• Legislate guaranteed legal representation for parents experiencing child removal to ensure the best interests of the child are a primary consideration.
• Explicitly prohibit and take active steps to stop separation of children from birth families because of socio-economic status, including poverty and financial reasons.
• Ensure that the rate of social security benefits, including parenting payments, are equivalent to a living wage so that recipients can enjoy their economic, social, and cultural rights, including access to food, health care, and an adequate standard of living, and that no one receiving such support is left below the poverty threshold.

Children and the criminal justice system

1. During the 2021 UPR, Australia stated that it was working to improve the protection of children within youth detention facilities.[31] However, since 2021, violations against children in detention have worsened. In 2024, Australia’s national children’s commissioner released a report that said children were subject to the most egregious human rights breaches in the country and called for national reform.[32] Children continue to be routinely subject to solitary confinement in which they are locked in their cells for more than 20 hours a day.[33]
2. During the 2021 UPR, Australia did not support the 31 recommendations calling to raise the age of criminal responsibility.[34] In most jurisdictions in the country, including federally, the age of criminal responsibility remains at 10 years,[35] well below the international standard of at least 14 years old.[36] In 2024, the Northern Territory lowered the age of criminal responsibility from 12 to 10.[37] The new law was adopted only two years after the territory had raised the age from 10 to 12 in 2022. In 2024, Northern Territory authorities also announced that “spit hoods” — a head covering that raises human rights concerns[38] — would again be used on children.[39]
3. On an average day, 700 children aged 10 to 17 are detained or imprisoned across Australia.[40] First Nations children make up approximately 60 percent of those detained, despite being only about 6 percent of the child population.[41]
4. Australia’s criminalization of children puts them on a trajectory to further incarceration as adults.[42] First Nations peoples also remain hugely overrepresented in adult prisons. The imprisonment rate for First Nations adults in 2024 was around 2,300 per 100,000, compared to 147 per 100,000 for non-Indigenous Australians. [43]
5. Children are held in facilities designed for adults.[44]
6. In Western Australia, two children took their own lives in the state’s youth detention system within 12 months in 2023-2024.[45]
7. In December 2024, Queensland passed what it dubbed “adult crime, adult time” laws that compel courts to give children convicted of certain crimes longer prison sentences, including life sentences for some offenses.[46] The laws ban courts from treating detention as a last resort for children, as required by the UN Convention on the Rights of Child, and from considering a non-custodial order more appropriate than detention for promoting a child’s reintegration into the community. Victoria passed similar laws in 2025 that result in detention no longer being treated as an option of last resort.[47] 

Recommendations:

• Raise the age of criminal responsibility to a minimum age of at least 14 years or older.
• Prohibit the practice of solitary confinement of children and the use of “spit hoods” on children.
• End the detention of children in adult prisons and remove Australia’s reservation to article 37(c) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which requires children to be detained separately from adults.
• Revoke laws that can subject children to life sentences. Legislate that detention and incarceration of children be an option of last resort.
• Fully implement all recommendations from the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, including those that address ending the disproportionate incarceration of First Nations peoples.

Rights of people with disabilities

1. During the 2021 UPR, Australia committed to ending discrimination and violence against people with disabilities in the criminal justice system.[48]
2. The Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with a Disability released its final report in 2023, which included 172 recommendations to the government. It found that people with disabilities were overrepresented in Australia’s prisons.[49]
3. Human Rights Watch has found that prisoners with disabilities in Australia regularly experience sexual, physical, and verbal violence from fellow prisoners or staff, and are disproportionately held in solitary confinement.[50]
4. In 2024 the government released its response to the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability.[51] Disability rights advocates criticized the government for only fully accepting 13 of the 172 recommendations directed to it.[52]

Recommendations:

• Introduce laws and policies that ensure prisoners with psychosocial (mental health) disabilities are never held in solitary confinement.
• Ensure prisoners with disabilities have adequate access to support and mental health services.
• Fully implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with a Disability.

Indigenous peoples’ rights

1. During the 2021 UPR, Australia stated it was “committed to recognising Indigenous Australians in the Constitution” and would hold a referendum and supported a recommendation on this.[53] It also said it was committed to co-designing an Indigenous “Voice” to Parliament.[54] In October 2023, a referendum for an Indigenous Voice enshrined in the Constitution was held but was unsuccessful. Since then, the government has made minimal strides in advancing rights of First Nations’ peoples.
2. In 2024, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that his government would not move forward with establishing a Makarrata Commission — a national body to facilitate truth-telling.[55]
3. In 2025, Victoria’s Yoorrook Justice Inquiry, which was Australia’s first Indigenous-led truth-telling inquiry, found that the decimation of the First Peoples population in Victoria “was the result of a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups … [which] was genocide.” [56]

Recommendations:

• Work with First Nations peoples to establish a national action plan and an Indigenous independent monitoring body to implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
• Establish a Makarrata Commission to facilitate truth-telling and negotiations on a national treaty.

Rights of older persons

1. During the 2021 UPR, Australia stated its commitment to “protecting the rights of older Australians,” and accepted recommendations on strengthening the protection of older person’s rights. [57]
2. Human Rights Watch in a 2019 report[58] found that many aged care facilities in Australia routinely give dangerous drugs to older people with dementia to control their behavior. This is done by aged care facilities without consent or a therapeutic purpose – a practice known as “chemical restraint.” In addition to the physical, social, and emotional harm for older people restrained with these drugs, the use of these drugs in older people with dementia is associated with an increased risk of death.[59]
3. In 2022, Human Rights Watch documented how chemical restraints had been used in more than 150 aged care facilities according to compliance reports from July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021, despite regulations introduced in 2019 aimed to reduce their use.[60] This continued use of chemical restraints is a violation of the human rights to health, bodily integrity, and equality, and could constitute cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment under international law.[61]
4. In its 2013 review of Australia, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities criticized the use of chemical restraints in relation to Australia’s obligations to prohibit torture and ill treatment and recommended that Australia take “immediate steps to end restrictive practices.”[62]
5. In 2024, Australia passed legislation for a new Aged Care Act[63] to come into effect in November 2025.[64] However, the act fails to ban chemical restraint and only seeks to minimize its use and therefore falls short of the committee’s recommendation that it should take steps to end restrictive practices.

Recommendations:

• Introduce legislation to prohibit the use of chemical restraints as a means of controlling the behavior of older people with dementia or for the convenience of staff. Any new law should ensure informed consent for all treatment or interventions, independent monitoring, and effective, accessible, independent complaint and enforcement mechanisms to protect older people’s rights.
• Ensure the Commonwealth National Preventative Mechanism monitors aged care and other facilities in which chemical restraint is used, since chemical restraint can amount to torture or ill-treatment.
• Make training in dementia and alternative methods to de-escalate unwanted behavior mandatory for all aged care facility staff.
• Ensure adequate minimum staffing levels in aged care facilities.

Human rights and the environment

1. During the 2021 UPR, Australia supported a recommendation to take immediate measures to fight against the effects of climate change on human rights.[65]
2. Despite presenting itself as a minor emitter, Australia is the world’s fifth largest polluter when carbon emissions from fossil fuel exports are included in calculations – and is moving ahead with major plans to further expand production for exports.[66]
3. In May 2025, the government announced it had given preliminary approval for Australia’s biggest fossil fuel project, the North West Shelf Project, to continue operations until 2070. [67] The facility, on Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsula, is the country's largest liquefied natural gas plant. It is estimated the extension will result in the annual release of 90 million tons of emissions.[68] The area surrounding the Burrup plant is known as Murujuga and is culturally significant to Indigenous groups for its ancient rock carvings. [69] There is evidence that the project’s air pollution is already damaging the carvings.[70]

Recommendations:

• Cease the approval of any new oil, gas, or coal projects, and adopt a policy framework to gradually phase out all fossil fuel while ramping up renewable production.
• Uphold Indigenous people’s cultural rights and the rights to a healthy environment by revoking the extension of the North West Shelf project’s license and reject further expansion of Burrup hub via a separate proposal for the Browse [71] project.

Footnotes