It has now been one year since the Country Liberal Party (CLP) returned to power in the Northern Territory.
They promised to make communities safer, but instead, have delivered a human rights crisis:
Children’s rights are being trampled
The CLP lowered the age of criminal responsibility from 12 to 10, so primary school children are being arrested and locked away.
They reintroduced spit hoods – dangerous devices that the United Nations has condemned as torture.
Over 402 children have been held in police watch houses in just six months, some as young as 10 in places never designed for children.
Prisons are dangerously overcrowded
Youth detention centres are beyond capacity, leaving kids crammed into unsafe, degrading conditions. With no space left, children are thrown into adult watch houses, cut off from family, culture, and education.
Reports show 20 women crammed into one cell in Alice Springs and an 11-year-old child locked in an adult facility in Palmerston.
The NT now has the second-highest imprisonment rate in the world, with more than 1% of its population behind bars – almost 90% of them Aboriginal.
The CLP’s crackdown has failed even on its own terms:
- House break-ins are up 15% in Darwin,
- Assaults are up 9% across the Territory,
- Youth reoffending remains high, proving that punishment without support only fuels more crime.
This is not justice. This is not safety. This is systemic abuse of children’s rights, and an attack on Aboriginal people who are disproportionately targeted.
We know what works:
- Raising the age, not lowering it,
- Community-led diversion programs that support children instead of criminalising them,
- Justice reinvestment – funding solutions that heal and strengthen communities, not overcrowded prisons.
We have challenged the CLP, and we have stood with families and Elders demanding dignity and evidence-based solutions. But the truth is clear: the CLP’s first year in power has entrenched human rights breaches in the Northern Territory.
Children are being harmed, families are being broken apart, and communities are less safe. We cannot allow this to become the new normal or the CLP to remain unchallenged.
Amnesty’s Indigenous Rights Campaigner, Kacey Teerman has been clear:
“The NT government cannot just abandon their obligations under human rights law. Spit hoods are torture. Children should only ever be detained as an absolute last resort.”
Kacey Teerman
The evidence is overwhelming: locking up kids does not make our communities safer. As Amnesty’s Indigenous Rights Advisor Rodney Dillon reminds us, “The hard work is yet to come.”
Amnesty International is a global movement of more than 10 million people who take injustice personally. We are campaigning for a world where human rights are enjoyed by all – and we can only do it with your support.
Act now or learn more about our Indigenous Justice campaigns.
