The Queensland government’s suspension of the Human Rights Act, allowing it to imprison children in police watch houses for adults, reflects its priorities.
On Wednesday, the Queensland government stealthily passed new laws that will allow children — predominately Black children — to be detained in watch houses for extended periods.
They passed it from a building that sits a 20-minute walk away from Brisbane’s Police Watch House, a place where Amnesty International in 2019 recorded more than 2655 breaches of domestic and international law, including the failure to “provide children with adequate clean clothes, underwear, and personal hygiene products, the institutional use of violence; the use of isolation as punishment, and failure to provide adequate health and medical care”.
It is the same place where brave whistleblower Steven Marshall revealed shocking racist and sexist remarks by watch house staff, where children were being exposed to sexual acts by incarcerated adults, where a girl was held in a holding cell with two male prisoners, where illegal strip searches were being carried out on children, and where children were treated like incarcerated adults.
Read more about the Queensland government’s priorities regarding incarceration of Indigenous children.
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