UN review calls on Australia to stop jailing 10-year-olds and pass Human Rights Act

A major United Nations review has urged Australia to lift the age at which children can be jailed and to adopt a national Human Rights Act, warning that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are bearing the brunt of current laws.

Australia’s human rights record was examined overnight in Geneva by the UN Human Rights Council under its Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a recurring peer review of each country’s performance. At Australia’s fourth UPR, more than 120 countries made roughly 350 recommendations, many focused on Indigenous justice, racism and legal protections.

Australian Human Rights Commission President Hugh de Kretser said there were “consistent messages from the international community”. He said that as a “wealthy, stable democracy” Australia should be “leading the world on human rights”, but that the review highlighted “many areas where we can and must do better”, with the strongest concerns about the rights of First Peoples.

Mr de Kretser said many countries called on Australia to raise the age of criminal responsibility, noting that “in most Australian jurisdictions, children as young as 10 can be arrested, prosecuted and jailed”. He described that situation as “inhumane” and “out of step with international human rights standards”, and said First Peoples are “hit hardest by these unjust laws”.

The minimum age of criminal responsibility is now 14 in the ACT and 12 in Victoria, while New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and the Commonwealth still set the minimum at 10. The Northern Territory briefly lifted its age to 12 in 2023 before lowering it back to 10 in late 2024. UN bodies including the Committee on the Rights of the Child have urged countries to set the minimum age at 14 or higher.

Those laws sit against stark incarceration figures. First Nations people made up 37 per cent of all prisoners in Australia in June 2025, and the age‑standardised imprisonment rate for First Nations adults has risen 21 per cent since 2019 while the rate for non‑Indigenous adults has fallen 15 per cent.

For children, First Nations young people aged 10–17 have made up roughly half or more of those in youth detention on an average night in recent years, and were 29 times as likely as non‑Indigenous children to be detained in mid‑2023. New Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research data show Aboriginal young people now account for about 60 per cent of children in youth detention, despite Aboriginal people being around 8 per cent of the state’s youth population.

Another major theme of the UPR was the absence of a national Human Rights Act. A 2024 parliamentary inquiry described existing federal protections as “piecemeal” and recommended a Human Rights Act to give people a direct way to challenge breaches, a call echoed by many countries in Geneva.

The Albanese Government is expected to respond to the UPR recommendations later this year.