The Australian government rejected over 60 percent of the recommendations from its latest United Nations human rights review, sparking criticism from advocates and experts.
In March, Australia underwent the UN’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR), where member states assess each other’s human rights records. More than 120 countries examined Australia’s record and issued 332 recommendations for improvement. The Albanese government accepted fewer than 40 percent of them.
Rejected proposals included calls to raise the age of criminal responsibility, establish a national Human Rights Act, implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, end mandatory immigration detention, strengthen protections for refugees and migrant workers, and ratify outstanding human rights treaties.
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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, said the government’s response reflects a broader change in the country’s approach to human rights. In a joint submission to the UN, they argued that Australia’s reliance on punishment has become so deeply rooted that even basic human rights demands are now treated as radical.
Voices pushed to the margins
Their submission stood out among others for its focus. Kilroy, Lean, and Pony explained they had to draft it separately because the experiences of criminalized women, sex workers, migrant women, and people directly affected by prisons, policing, and borders were being excluded from broader advocacy efforts.
“We realized if we did not undertake a separate joint submission, our voices would not be heard,” they wrote. Their submission highlighted a persistent issue in human rights advocacy: lived experience is often welcomed only when it fits within existing policy frameworks. When communities challenge the systems themselves—prisons, policing, border enforcement—they are dismissed as unrealistic.
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Their submission also highlighted evidence on the imprisonment of women, particularly First Nations women, along with issues like strip searching, immigration detention, and the criminalization of sex workers and migrant women.
A political center that rejects human rights
The authors said their analysis was rejected not because it was extreme, but because it challenged what Australia now considers normal. For decades, the country has treated prisons, policing, and detention as the default solutions to social problems. Raising the age of criminal responsibility, for example, is dismissed as unrealistic not due to a lack of evidence, but because it forces a rethinking of existing systems.
Their submission went beyond reform—it questioned whether these institutions cause the harms they claim to address. Safety, they argued, comes from housing, healthcare, self-determination, income security, and community-led responses to violence, not from expanded punishment.
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Australia’s rejection of even modest international recommendations shows the problem is not the radicalism of abolitionist ideas, but the country’s growing resistance to human rights standards. The government’s UPR response reveals how much the political center has moved toward punishment, making basic human rights protections seem like unreasonable demands.
For the authors, this only deepens their commitment. They did not expect immediate change from the UPR. Instead, they saw it as a chance to create a record of truth—one documenting the experiences of criminalized women, imprisoned people, sex workers, and migrant communities. Governments may reject recommendations, but they cannot erase the fact that those recommendations were made or that international scrutiny of Australia’s reliance on punishment is increasing.
Change rarely happens because governments choose justice willingly. It happens because communities keep documenting harm, organizing, and refusing to be ignored. The UPR is one step in that effort. The Albanese government may have dismissed most recommendations, but it did not dismiss global attention.