Queensland unlawfully detained children in adult watch house without private toilet access, tribunal finds

State ordered to apologise after ruling finds it breached law when detaining teenagers in a Cairns watch house

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The Queensland government broke the law and violated the human rights of three children by detaining them in an adult-only watch house without private toilet access or clean clothes, according to a tribunal judgment.

The case was brought by three teenagers separately detained in the Cairns watch house between June 2021 and 2022. They were then aged between 13 and 17.

The Queensland civil and administrative tribunal ruled on Monday that the conditions the trio were kept in breached their rights, including their right to be treated with humanity and respect, to privacy, to education and to protection.

The Cairns watch house is designed to detain adults for “one to three days”, but not children, the tribunal found.

The three children were detained in cells with no natural light, with one child describing their detention as “like being in a closed brick box”.

They were required to use the toilet in front of other children and on CCTV camera within earshot of “screaming” adults, not provided clean clothes every day and denied access to adequate education or even a way to pass the time.

In a one-year period, one child was detained there on two occasions, the longest of which lasted for 11 days; the second child was detained three times for up to nine days at a time, and the third child 10 times for up to 12 days at a time.

One of them, known as DC, was also made to wear an anti-suicide smock and detained in a padded cell. Another detainee, a 13-year-old boy, was detained in a padded cell as punishment for banging on his cell door after 8.30pm, the tribunal found.

DC also told the Qcat he was “verbally threatened by the watch house officers”.

“When told [a person] had died in a car accident, a watch house officer said, “shut up you wimp, stop fucking crying, that’s what happens when you little cocksuckers steal cars. Your friend’s dead now, there’s nothing you can do so shut the fuck up,” the tribunal found.

Qcat has ordered the state of Queensland to make an apology for its breach of human rights.

Judicial member Peter Murphy ruled the children had also been discriminated against, but was overruled by members Stephen Lumb and Elizabeth Gaffney.

As a result the state will not be required to pay compensation.

Murphy wrote the state would have been liable for detaining them unlawfully but retroactively exempted itself from liability in legislation passed in 2023, under Labor.

Youth Advocacy Centre CEO Katherine Hayes said that, like other human rights cases , there were no consequences for the state’s breach of the law, aside from “public shame”.

The case only applied to the specific facts of the three children but was also a general condemnation of the system as a whole, she said.

“Those facts are replicated every day across Queensland when kids are held, particularly in the Cairns watch house, more than two to a cell, which is happening today,” she said.

The Guardian has repeatedly exposed the appalling conditions in Queensland’s watch house system, including lack of privacy and other abuses .

There are now 45 children in adults-only watch houses, with stays of up to 12 days, she said. Hayes said even the newest watch house, the Wacol remand centre, does not provide children natural light.

“If you had any humanity, you wouldn’t want to treat kids that way.”

Minister for police Dan Purdie did not answer questions about whether the government would make the apology, blaming the former Labor government. He said the government had invested $16m in “a full system overhaul”.