Children's Rights Through the Lens of Immigration Detention

This paper focuses on the impact of Australia’s immigration detention regime on children and their families. It contends that immigration detention may be used as a lens through which Australia’s commitment to children’s rights may be gauged. While all children in immigration detention were released into the community in 2005, the legislative amendments which preceded their release introduced principles of children’s rights as a matter of aspiration as opposed to legal doctrine. It is suggested that a substantive commitment to children’s rights would extend to the incorporation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child into Australian law via domestic legislation, thus facilitating the development of a culture and jurisprudence of children’s rights and averting future institutionalised violations of fundamental human rights.