Page 1242 - Week 04 - Thursday, 5 May 2022
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The first of these protections is for individuals who are not citizens or permanent residents of Australia. To improve their protections, the bill extends an entitlement to non-citizens and non-permanent residents to have access to diplomatic or consular contact. This amendment requires ACT Policing to inform a detained individual, who is not a citizen or permanent resident, of their right to have a diplomatic or consular representative of their state informed of their detention. If asked by a detainee, ACT Policing is required to inform the respective diplomatic or consular representative.
The second group the bill improves protections for is detained individuals who have impaired decision-making ability. This includes any person whose decision-making ability is impaired because of a physical, mental, psychological or intellectual condition or state. Currently, individuals with impaired decision-making ability are allowed to have contact with a parent, guardian or other support person for up to two hours each day. This bill will increase this special contact period to four hours each day.
The bill also includes amendments which will place an obligation on police officers detaining individuals with impaired decision-making ability to exercise their best efforts in locating a parent, guardian or support person. Police officers may refuse contact between a detained person with impaired decision-making ability and another support person on the grounds that this other person is unacceptable. To further improve protections and ensure police accountability for these decisions, the bill includes an amendment that requires police to provide reasons as to why this person has been found unacceptable, and allows a detained person with impaired decision-making ability to nominate another parent, guardian or other support person to have contact with.
The final amendment that the bill makes to improve human rights protections applies to all individuals who may be detained under the act. This amendment will allow identification material, mainly in the form of videos and photographs, to be taken of a detained individual for the purposes of recording an injury or illness they may have suffered while in detention.
A consequential amendment in the bill provides that any identification material taken for the purposes of recording an injury or illness can be used only in a complaint, an investigation or a proceeding that relates to the detained person’s apprehension or detention.
The aim of these amendments is to ensure a person’s wellbeing while detained and also to improve and ensure police accountability for any injury or illness that a detained person may suffer.
This amendment to take and use identification material is likely to limit the right to privacy contained in section 12 of the Human Rights Act. However, there are safeguards in place to protect the privacy of an individual and restrict the impact of this limitation. The amendment to specify that the identification material can be used only for a certain purpose operates as a safeguard and there are also important provisions in the act that dictate the time frames for which this identification material is required to be destroyed.
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