Australia

AlertIll-treatment in immigration detentionAustralia

Basis: a decision of the United Nations Committee against Torture on an individual complaint, adopted 27 November 2025; two decisions of the Human Rights Committee on Nauru, adopted October 2024; the Committee against Torture’s concluding observations of November 2022; and the report of the Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture on a visit Australia agreed to and then obstructed. The Coalition does not record a finding that Australia has committed torture. It records that Australia has been found responsible, under two treaties and by two bodies, for cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of people it detained, on its own territory and on islands it paid other states to hold them on, and that it has argued in each case that the people were not its responsibility.

Committee against Torture, A.A. v Australia, 27 November 2025
On Manus Island: “the significant levels of control and influence exercised by the State Party over the operation of the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre amounted to such control”, so that the man detained there “was subject to the jurisdiction of the State Party”. The Committee found a violation of article 2 (1), read in conjunction with article 1 (1), and of article 16 (1) for his detention there, and a second violation of article 16 (1) for his detention in Australia.
Committee against Torture, quoting the Australian Senate
The Committee adopted the finding of Australia’s own Senate committee that there were “harsh and inhumane conditions” at the Manus Island centre and that “it is clear from evidence presented to the committee that the Australian Government failed in its duty to protect asylum seekers”.
Human Rights Committee, M.I. and Others v Australia, 31 October 2024
On Nauru: Australia’s control “went beyond a general situation of dependence and support”, and “the transfer of the authors to Nauru did not extinguish the State party’s obligations towards them”. Violation of article 9 of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Human Rights Committee, M.M.M. and Others v Australia, 25 July 2013
On detention inside Australia: “the combination of the arbitrary character of the authors’ detention, its protracted and/or indefinite duration, the refusal to provide information and procedural rights to the authors and the difficult conditions of detention are cumulatively inflicting serious psychological harm upon them, and constitute treatment contrary to article 7 of the Covenant.”
Committee against Torture, concluding observations, 23 November 2022
“The Committee is particularly concerned about what appears to be the use of detention powers as a general deterrent against unlawful entry rather than in response to an individual risk.” Its recommendation: “End its policy of offshore processing of asylum claims”.
Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture, report of 20 December 2023
The Subcommittee’s visit “was suspended by the Subcommittee on 23 October because of a lack of cooperation by the State party and was finally terminated on 17 February 2023”. It recorded “persistent negative media coverage, including pernicious remarks from government officials in certain regions, amounting to what the Subcommittee would qualify as a smear campaign”.

What an Alert meansDesignated September 10, 2026Review: on Australia’s response to the Committee against Torture in A.A., and on the Committee’s examination of the seventh periodic report

Why this page is here. Australia has no part in the United States removal programme, and nothing on this page concerns it. Australia is here because of its own conduct, judged by the same standard the Coalition applies everywhere: what a state has done, what a court or a treaty body has found about it, and whether a person harmed by it has anywhere to go. The Coalition holds every state to that standard, including the states that write the reports about other states.

What has happened

Since August 2012 Australia has transferred people who arrived by boat without a visa to detention centres on Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, under arrangements with those two governments, and has argued to the treaty bodies that the people held there were not under its jurisdiction. It funded the centres, was authorised to manage them jointly, monitored them, and chose the private companies that built, guarded and ran them. The Manus Island centre closed on 31 October 2017. The Nauru arrangements have not been ended, and in February 2025 a second and legally distinct arrangement with Nauru came into force under which people are removed from Australia to Nauru on an indefinite stay visa. Inside Australia, detention remains mandatory for any person without a valid visa, with no maximum period set by law.

Human Rights Watch, marking twenty-five years of the policy on 9 September 2026, records the scale. Australia’s offshore system began on 17 September 2001, when a naval ship carried the first group of people seeking asylum to Nauru. “From 2001 to 2008, Australia transferred 1,637 asylum seekers to Naoero and Manus Island.” “In this second phase, from 2012 until 2026, Australia transferred more than 4,000 asylum seekers to Naoero and PNG.” “At least 14 people have died in Australia’s offshore detention system since 2012.” On the present day it says: “While Australia no longer sends people to Manus Island following a 2016 PNG Supreme Court ruling, it continues to forcibly transfer people seeking asylum to Naoero, with an estimated 110 people currently there.” That is an estimate by a named organisation with a documented method, not a finding, and it is the most recent figure the Coalition has been able to verify. Note what it counts: people on Nauru, not people behind a detention perimeter. Nauru holds people at the processing centre and people in community accommodation, and the Coalition has found no current breakdown between the two.

Arrangements. Documented. Memoranda of understanding with Nauru and with Papua New Guinea for regional processing. An Interim Third Country Reception Arrangement with Nauru, in force from 12 February 2025, under a separate section of the Migration Act.

Transfers. Documented, by Australia’s own submissions, by the Committee against Torture and by the Human Rights Committee.

Onward return. Investigating. The Committee against Torture recorded that conditions in the Nauru centres had “allegedly compelled some asylum-seekers to return to their country of origin, despite the risks that they face there”. No body has made a finding on that.

People holding protection. Investigating. The Committee recorded that people whose refugee status was recognised but who received an adverse security or character assessment “can be detained indefinitely, without adequate procedural safeguards to meaningfully challenge their detention”.

What the treaty bodies have found: two treaties, two bodies, two islands

The Coalition keeps these findings apart, because they rest on different treaties and were made by different bodies, and a page that merged them would be wrong.

Manus Island: the Committee against Torture, November 2025

On 27 November 2025 the Committee against Torture adopted its decision in A.A. v Australia, communication No. 1079/2021. The complainant, an Iranian national, was transferred to Manus Island in 2013. While detained there he was attacked; in the Committee’s own words, by “an unknown person who slashed his throat”. The Coalition uses the Committee’s words rather than the complainant’s account, which is that a guard did it, because the Committee did not find that.

Australia argued that it “did not exercise any effective control over detainees in the Manus Regional Processing Centre in Papua New Guinea because its officials at no time detained those individuals or took physical custody of them”. Australia did not contest what had happened to him there; the Committee recorded that the State Party “has refrained from commenting on the merits of the complainant’s allegation with regard to his time spent in Papua New Guinea”.

The Committee rejected the jurisdictional argument. It found that Australia “funded the detention operations, was authorized to jointly manage them, participated in monitoring them and selected companies that would be responsible (directly or through subcontractors) for construction, security, garrison, health and other services at the detention centre”, and that this amounted to control. It adopted the finding of Australia’s own Senate committee, from December 2014, that “the degree of involvement by the Australian Government in the establishment, use, operation, and provision of total funding for the centre clearly satisfies the test of effective control in international law, and the government’s ongoing refusal to concede this point displayed a denial of Australia’s international obligations”. It added that oversight “should have been all the more stringent since Papua New Guinea is not a State Party to the Convention, rendering the complainant without a remedy under the Convention”.

The Committee found a violation of article 2 (1), read with article 1 (1), and of article 16 (1), for the detention on Manus Island, and a separate violation of article 16 (1) for the man’s detention in Australia. It did not find that Australia had committed torture. It found a failure to prevent it, and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. It urged Australia to let him have his asylum claim examined by Australian authorities, to give him “appropriate redress, including compensation for material and non-material damages, restitution, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition”, and to “ensure that similar violations do not occur in the future”, and asked for a response within ninety days.

The complainant had also asked the Committee to find that his proposed transfer to Nauru would breach article 3. The Committee declared that claim moot, because no decision to transfer him was in force. Nothing in this decision is a finding about Nauru.

The dissent. One of the ten members, Bakhtiyar Tuzmukhamedov, dissented. He wrote that the concept of effective control “is completely irrelevant in the context of the communication at hand”, that Papua New Guinea “entered into the treaty with Australia in the exercise of its free sovereign will and did not surrender its jurisdiction over the territory on which the Centre was set up”, and that the Manus claims “should have been rejected”. He would have found a different violation, of article 5 (1) (b). The Coalition publishes the dissent alongside the decision because a reader is entitled to it.

Nauru: the Human Rights Committee, October 2024

The Committee against Torture has made no finding about Nauru. The Human Rights Committee, which sits under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and not under the Convention against Torture, has made two. In M.I. and Others v Australia, adopted 31 October 2024, it found that Australia “funded the detention operations, was authorized to jointly manage them, participated in monitoring them, selected companies which would be responsible (directly or through subcontractors) for construction, security, garrison, health and other services at the detention centre, and provided police services to Nauru to help manage the detention operations”, that its control “went beyond a general situation of dependence and support”, and that “the transfer of the authors to Nauru did not extinguish the State party’s obligations towards them under article 9 of the Covenant”. It found violations of article 9 (1) and (4), ordered compensation for the detention on Christmas Island and on Nauru, and told Australia to “review and modify its migration legislation and policies and any bilateral offshore transfer arrangements for migrants”.

In Nabhari v Australia, adopted 25 October 2024, it reached the same conclusion for a woman held on Nauru from 2014 to 2018: “the physical transfer of the author to Nauru did not extinguish the State party’s obligations towards her under article 9 of the Covenant”. Both findings are about arbitrary detention under article 9. Neither is a finding of torture or ill-treatment.

Inside Australia: article 7 of the Covenant

The Human Rights Committee has found against Australia on immigration detention at least twelve times since 1997, beginning with A v Australia, in which it held that “detention should not continue beyond the period for which the State can provide appropriate justification” and that “without such factors detention may be considered arbitrary, even if entry was illegal”. Three of those decisions found a violation of article 7 of the Covenant, the prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment: C v Australia in 2002, and F.K.A.G. and Others and M.M.M. and Others in 2013, the last of which held that the combination of arbitrary, indefinite detention, the refusal of information and procedural rights, and the conditions of detention was “cumulatively inflicting serious psychological harm” on the people held, and told Australia to release them, compensate them and “review its migration legislation to ensure its conformity with the requirements of articles 7 and 9”.

The Committee against Torture’s concluding observations of November 2022 asked Australia to “repeal the legal provisions establishing the mandatory detention of persons entering its territory irregularly”, to “establish statutory time limits for immigration detention”, and to “guarantee that refugees with adverse security or character assessments and stateless persons whose asylum claims were refused are not held in detention indefinitely”. Australia’s follow-up report of May 2024 answered: “Immigration detention is administrative in nature and is not used for punitive purposes.”

The inspection Australia agreed to, and then obstructed

Australia ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture on 21 December 2017. The Optional Protocol has two parts that matter here: it opens every place of detention to unannounced visits by the Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture, and it requires the state to set up its own national inspection body. On ratifying, Australia declared that it was postponing the second obligation for three years. It then obtained an extension to 20 January 2023. As of 30 June 2025 the network was still incomplete, with no body nominated by New South Wales, Queensland or Victoria.

The Subcommittee began its visit on 16 October 2022. It was, in its own words, “denied access to both closed psychiatric facilities and closed forensic facilities in the State of Queensland and to all places of detention, except for federal immigration detention centres, in the State of New South Wales”. It suspended the visit on 23 October 2022, asked for assurances by 31 January 2023, did not receive them, and on 17 February 2023 terminated the visit, having “no prospects of unfettered access to all places of detention in all jurisdictions”. It recorded “a discourteous, and in some cases hostile, reception” and “a fundamental lack of understanding, among both federal and state authorities, of the Optional Protocol”. The two states that blocked it are two of the three that still have no inspection body.

Australia authorised publication of the Subcommittee’s report. It was not required to, and the Coalition records that it did.

What Australia’s own courts have done, in both directions

On 8 November 2023 the High Court of Australia ordered the release of a man held in immigration detention with no prospect of removal, and in reasons delivered on 28 November it overruled its own 2004 decision that had permitted indefinite detention, holding that executive detention of a non-citizen ends when there is no real prospect of removal becoming practicable in the reasonably foreseeable future. That decision, NZYQ v Minister for Immigration, did what the Human Rights Committee had been asking for since 1997, and it did it as a matter of the Australian Constitution.

Parliament’s response was to build a route to Nauru. It inserted new sections into the Migration Act; an Interim Third Country Reception Arrangement with Nauru came into force on 12 February 2025; and people released after NZYQ began to be returned to detention pending removal to Nauru. One of them challenged his removal. The trial judge found as a fact that “the medical services available in Nauru are inadequate to manage [his] condition of severe asthma on an ongoing basis”, and dismissed his application. While his appeal was pending, Parliament passed an Act deeming the Nauru arrangement “valid”, “for all purposes”, against the procedural fairness ground he had raised, and the Attorney-General removed the case into the High Court.

On 6 May 2026, in TCXM v Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, the High Court unanimously dismissed the appeal. In the Court’s own summary, the lawfulness of the arrangement “was conclusively resolved by the operation of item 10 of Sch 1 to the 2025 Amendment Act”, and the Migration Act “authorised and required the removal of the appellant from Australia to Nauru and, in so operating, would not contravene Ch III of the Constitution”. The Coalition has read the Court’s published summary and not the full reasons, which it could not obtain, and it quotes the summary as a summary.

That decision cuts three ways and the Coalition sets out all three. Australia’s highest court held removals to Nauru lawful and constitutional. The challenge to the arrangement was not defeated on its merits; Parliament legislated it away while the appeal was on foot. And a man whom a judge had found Nauru could not treat was ordered removed there anyway. The domestic remedy arrived in 2023, and was then routed around.

What runs the other way

Australia accepted the individual complaint procedure under article 22 of the Convention on 28 January 1993, together with the article 21 procedure, and it has accepted individual complaints under the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Every finding on this page exists because Australia agreed to be answerable. Several of the states this site covers have not.

Australia answers. It replied to eighteen of the twenty-one letters sent to it by United Nations special procedures since 2022, and it replied to essentially every letter about offshore detention before that. It filed its follow-up report to the Committee against Torture. It appeared for its review. It authorised publication of the Subcommittee’s report on the visit it obstructed.

The Manus Island centre closed on 31 October 2017. The High Court ended indefinite detention in 2023, and Parliament created a visa class for people with no real prospect of removal. The Committee against Torture noted the reduction in the number of children in immigration detention.

Australia’s stated position is that it “is entitled to take measures to uphold the integrity of Australia’s national borders”, that a person without a visa “must be detained so that they can undergo the relevant security, health and identity checks”, and that detention “is administrative in nature and is not used for punitive purposes”. The Coalition reports that position in Australia’s words.

One member of the Committee against Torture dissented in A.A., on the ground that Papua New Guinea never surrendered jurisdiction, and the High Court was unanimous in TCXM. Anyone who reads this page as a record of a state that has lost every argument has not read it.

What is not established

That any body has found that Australia committed torture. None has. The Committee against Torture found a failure to prevent, and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. The Human Rights Committee found treatment contrary to article 7 of the Covenant, which covers both torture and ill-treatment, without characterising it as torture.

That the Committee against Torture has found Australia responsible for Nauru. It has not. The Nauru findings are the Human Rights Committee’s, on arbitrary detention. The Committee against Torture declared the Nauru claim in A.A. moot.

That a guard cut the complainant’s throat on Manus Island. That is his account. The Committee found that an unknown person did.

That A.A. is the first such decision. The Coalition has seen that claim and has not verified it, and does not repeat it.

How many people on Nauru are confined, as against living in community accommodation. Investigating. Human Rights Watch’s estimate of 110, quoted above, counts people on the island. No source the Coalition has verified breaks that number down, and no figure is published for how many people have been removed to Nauru under the arrangement that came into force in February 2025. Only the Department of Home Affairs or Senate Estimates can settle either, and the Coalition uses no number it has not verified.

Whether Australia has responded to the Committee in A.A. The ninety-day period ran from early 2026. No response is on the public record as of the date below.

What this page does not yet carry

A section naming the organisations in Australia, on Nauru and in Papua New Guinea that act for people held under these arrangements, with contact details that have been checked. It is being built.

The full reasons of the High Court in TCXM. The Court’s website could not be reached in a way that respected its access rules, and the Coalition does not go around those. The published summary is quoted, and marked as a summary.

If you can correct anything on this page, the Coalition wants to hear it.

Sources

Every source relied on above, linked so it can be read in full rather than through this summary.

Committee against Torture. A.A. v Australia, communication No. 1079/2021, CAT/C/83/D/1079/2021, adopted 27 November 2025, issued 23 January 2026, with the individual opinion of Mr Tuzmukhamedov annexed. Concluding observations on the sixth periodic report of Australia, CAT/C/AUS/CO/6, adopted 23 November 2022, paragraphs 27 to 30, 41 and 43 to 44. Australia’s follow-up report, CAT/C/AUS/FCO/6, received 13 May 2024, paragraphs 5 to 8. List of issues prior to the seventh report, CAT/C/AUS/QPR/7, 31 December 2025, paragraphs 15 and 20.

Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture. Visit to Australia undertaken from 16 to 23 October 2022, CAT/OP/AUS/ROSP/1, 20 December 2023, paragraphs 1, 4, 6, 7, 14 and 15. Commonwealth Ombudsman, Australian National Preventive Mechanism Annual Report 2024–25.

Human Rights Committee. M.I. and Others v Australia, CCPR/C/142/D/2749/2016, 31 October 2024. Nabhari v Australia, CCPR/C/142/D/3663/2019, 25 October 2024. M.M.M. and Others v Australia, CCPR/C/108/D/2136/2012, 25 July 2013. F.K.A.G. and Others v Australia, CCPR/C/108/D/2094/2011, 26 July 2013. C v Australia, CCPR/C/76/D/900/1999, 28 October 2002. A v Australia, CCPR/C/59/D/560/1993, 3 April 1997.

High Court of Australia. TCXM v Minister for Immigration and Citizenship [2026] HCA 13, 6 May 2026, judgment summary, which states that it is not a substitute for the Court’s reasons. NZYQ v Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs [2023] HCA 37, orders 8 November 2023, reasons 28 November 2023, (2023) 280 CLR 137.

Treaty status, from the depositary. United Nations Treaty Collection, chapter IV-9 for the ratification of 8 August 1989 and the article 21 and article 22 declarations of 28 January 1993, and chapter IV-9-b for the ratification of the Optional Protocol on 21 December 2017 and the declaration postponing Part IV.

Reports. Human Rights Watch, Australia: 25 Years of Abusive Offshore Detention, 9 September 2026.

United Nations special procedures. The communications database, searched for Australia on 10 September 2026: twenty-one letters since 2022, none on immigration detention or offshore processing; the most recent on offshore detention is AUS 4/2019 of 2 April 2019, answered 3 June 2019.

Compiled 10 September 2026. Where this page summarises a decision or a report, the full document is linked above and should be read in preference to this summary. Every quotation was taken from the document itself, except the High Court summary, which is quoted as a summary. Four claims that appeared in the Coalition’s working notes were removed before publication because they could not be verified or were wrong: that the Committee against Torture had found Australia responsible for Nauru, that A.A. was the first such decision, that a guard carried out the attack on Manus Island, and that special procedures had raised offshore detention with Australia since 2022. The figure of 110 is quoted as what Human Rights Watch published, an estimate of people on Nauru, and is not restated as a number of people detained. Corrections to the Coalition.