Introduction by Croakey: The Federal Government’s rejection of most recommendations from a major United Nations human rights review has been widely criticised, and is seen by some experts as a sign that far right populist parties are having a strong influence, Croakey reported recently.
The authors of a submission to the UN review, which drew on the knowledge of criminalised women, sex workers, migrant women and people directly targeted by prisons, policing and borders, argue in the article below that Australia’s “political centre has shifted so far towards punishment that human rights themselves are increasingly treated as unreasonable demands”.
“Australia has become so invested in prisons, policing, detention and punishment that even the international community’s relatively cautious recommendations are considered too much,” they write.
The article is by Debbie Kilroy, CEO of Sisters Inside, Tabitha Lean of the National Network of Incarcerated & Formerly Incarcerated Women & Girls, and Mish Pony, CEO of Scarlet Alliance.
Debbie Kilroy, Tabitha Lean and Mish Pony write:
When Australia appeared before the United Nations earlier this year for its Universal Periodic Review, a process in which every UN member state’s human rights record is periodically examined by other countries, more than 120 countries scrutinised Australia’s human rights record and made 332 recommendations for how this country could better uphold the rights of its people.
The Albanese Government rejected more than 60 percent of them. It rejected calls to raise the age of criminal responsibility, legislate a national Human Rights Act, implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, end mandatory immigration detention, strengthen refugee and migrant worker protections and ratify outstanding human rights treaties.
None of this should surprise those of us who have spent years documenting the violence of Australian institutions, but it should force us to ask a deeper question. If the Australian Government is unwilling to accept recommendations made by dozens of governments across the world, what chance do communities directly experiencing these harms have of being heard?
For us, the Universal Periodic Review was never simply about making recommendations. It was about insisting that our communities had the right to speak for ourselves.
Last year, Sisters Inside, the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, Scarlet Alliance and the Asian Migrant Sex Worker Advisory Group came together to submit a joint report to the United Nations.
It was not because no one else was writing submissions. It was because we discovered, during the Australian NGO coalition process, that the knowledge of criminalised women, sex workers, migrant women and people directly targeted by prisons, policing and borders was being pushed to the margins.
We wrote plainly in our submission: “We realised if we did not undertake a separate joint submission then our voices would not be heard.”
That sentence should concern everyone committed to human rights. Too often, lived experience is welcomed only when it confirms existing policy positions. Communities are invited into consultation but expected to speak within boundaries already established by governments, institutions and large NGOs.
The moment we begin questioning prisons themselves, policing itself, border violence itself, or the structures producing poverty and criminalisation, we are described as unrealistic, ideological or simply too radical.
On the international record
Yet something important happened once our submission reached Geneva. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights did not dismiss it. Instead, many of our concerns became part of Australia’s official stakeholder summary.
Our submission was specifically referenced on access to justice, where the UN summary recorded our concern that Australia is dismantling legal assistance and entrenching inequality through chronic underfunding of community-led legal services.
It cited our concerns about predictive policing and artificial intelligence, reflecting our warning that these technologies amplify racial discrimination and shield police from accountability.
It also recognised our evidence regarding the imprisonment of women, particularly First Nations women, alongside issues including policing, strip searching, immigration detention, family violence responses and the criminalisation of sex workers and migrant women.
These were not fringe ideas excluded from serious human rights discussion. They became part of the international human rights record, although not accepted by the Australian Government.
Rethinking ‘radical’
Our analysis was not rejected in Australia because it was radical. It was rejected because it challenged Australia’s political common sense.
For decades, Australia has treated prisons, policing, detention and surveillance as the obvious solutions to social problems. More prisons are common sense. More police are common sense. Locking up ten-year-old, fourteen-year-old or sixteen-year-old children is presented as common sense. Mandatory detention is common sense. Expanding police powers is common sense.
Once these assumptions become normalised, any proposal that questions them is dismissed as unrealistic, not because it lacks evidence, but because it asks us to imagine a different political horizon.
That is precisely what our submission did. It did not simply recommend improving prisons or making policing more accountable. It asked whether these institutions themselves are producing the harms they claim to solve. It argued that safety is built through housing, healthcare, self-determination, income security, community-led responses to violence and genuine access to justice, not through ever-expanding systems of punishment.
For many Australian policymakers, that analysis appears radical.
Yet the irony is that when Australia stood before the international community, it was not asked to abolish prisons. It was asked to implement comparatively modest human rights reforms: raise the age of criminal responsibility, legislate a Human Rights Act, strengthen Indigenous self-determination, improve legal protections for refugees and uphold international treaties it has already signed.
Australia rejected most of those too.
That should cause us to rethink what we call radical. If even these measured, internationally accepted human rights standards are considered politically unacceptable, then the issue is not the “extremity” of abolitionist ideas.
The issue is that Australia’s political centre has shifted so far towards punishment that human rights themselves are increasingly treated as unreasonable demands.
Perhaps the greatest lesson from this UPR is not that our submission was too ambitious. It is that Australia has become so invested in prisons, policing, detention and punishment that even the international community’s relatively cautious recommendations are considered too much.
For organisations like ours, that only strengthens our resolve.
The longer struggle
We did not participate in the UPR because we expected governments to suddenly agree with us.
We participated because international human rights processes create another archive of truth, one that cannot easily erase the knowledge produced by criminalised women, imprisoned people, sex workers and migrant communities.
Governments may reject recommendations, but they cannot erase the fact that those recommendations were made, nor the growing international recognition that Australia’s reliance on punishment is itself a human rights issue.
History rarely moves because governments voluntarily choose justice. It moves because communities continue documenting harm, organising collectively and refusing to allow their experiences to disappear.
The Universal Periodic Review is one moment in that longer struggle. The Albanese Government may have rejected most of the recommendations, but it did not reject the fact that the world is now watching.
Author details
Debbie Kilroy is CEO og Sisters Inside.
Tabitha Lean is from the National Network of Incarcerated & Formerly Incarcerated Women & Girls.
Mish Pony is CEO of Scarlet Alliance.
See Croakey’s archive of articles on human rights and health
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