The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) warned in a statement issued Tuesday that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in Australia continue to face systemic racial discrimination within the country’s criminal justice system. The committee urged the state to intensify efforts to eliminate racial discrimination against Indigenous children, including the institutional discrimination within the administration of criminal justice.
The committee raised alarm over their persistent over-representation in youth detention, finding that Indigenous children made up around 65 percent of children in detention on an average day in 2023-24, despite comprising only 6.5 percent of Australia’s children aged ten to seventeen. CERD said the disparity reflected wider structural inequalities faced by Indigenous children and communities, including discrimination in access to education, healthcare, housing and social security. It further noted that racial profiling, over-policing and law enforcement practices continue to increase the likelihood of Indigenous children being arrested, prosecuted and detained.
The committee also criticized the minimum age of criminal responsibility, which remains below international human rights standards in many jurisdictions and, in some cases, is as low as 10. It expressed concern that certain legal frameworks permit children to receive harsh adult penalties, including life imprisonment in some cases.
It further raised serious concerns about detention conditions affecting Indigenous children, including prolonged solitary confinement, detention with adults, inadequate healthcare, ill-treatment, use of spit hoods, and reported incidents of self-harm and suicide.
While acknowledging steps taken by Australia, including the establishment of the National Commission for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People, the National Justice Reinvestment Program and the Indigenous Advancement Strategy, CERD said it remained concerned by the absence of adequate information on whether these measures were effectively reducing over-representation.
The statement forms part of a broader pattern of international scrutiny of Australia’s youth justice systems. In January 2024, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advocates, human rights organizations and civil society groups criticized the Victorian Government over alleged mistreatment of children in youth prisons and delays in implementing safeguards under the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT), which Australia ratified in 2017. The advocates warned that children in Victorian youth prisons had been subjected to practices including solitary confinement and spit-hooding.
In May 2025, UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Alice Jill Edwards and Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, Albert K. Barume, also urged Queensland lawmakers to reject the Making Queensland Safer (Adult Crime, Adult Time) Amendment Bill 2025. The experts warned that the bill, which sought to expand the range of offences for which children could receive adult sentences, was incompatible with basic child rights and would disproportionately harm Indigenous children already over-represented in the criminal legal system.
