Visit of UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to Australia
Read the Commission's submission to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ahead of its December 2025 visit to Australia, addressing detention practices
Summary
Learn more about how the Commission is urging UN action on arbitrary detention in prisons, immigration centres and care settings.
Visit of UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to Australia
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The Australian Human Rights Commission has made a submission to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD), ahead of its visit to Australia in December 2025.
The WGAD will look at how people are deprived of their liberty in 3 key areas:
- criminal justice, including child justice
- immigration detention
- social care settings, including people with psychosocial disabilities, children in institutions and older people in aged care facilities.
The Commission’s submission focuses on laws and policies at both federal and state levels in these 3 areas. It highlights examples of good practice and recent improvements but also raises serious concerns.
These concerns relate to conditions in prisons, police watch houses, immigration detention facilities and other places where people might be forcibly detained across Australia, including hospitals and aged care, mental health and disability facilities. In some cases, people may be detained arbitrarily or for indefinite periods.
Many of these issues are long-standing and well known. The submission states that successive governments have failed to make the changes needed to fix these issues and meet Australia’s human rights obligations.
The Commission makes 16 recommendations in the submission and urges the WGAD to include them in its post-visit report to the Australian Government.
