Abstract
Australia’s mandatory immigration detention regime has inflicted multiple harms upon thousands of detainees, especially children. This has been extensively documented by UN agencies, official monitoring bodies, non-government organisations, academics and camp workers. Criticisms of the detention regime are framed as contraventions of Australia’s human rights obligations. This chapter explores the limitations of that approach. It argues that it is necessary to go beyond contemporary human rights paradigms to both understand and challenge the detention regime. It also asserts that human rights constitute a structural element of national sovereignty rather than a universal, emancipatory project. Therefore, to break the nexus between human rights, sovereignty and detention, it is necessary to re-frame rights around the collective agency of refugees and the legitimacy of free movement.
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Re Woolley; Ex parte Applicants M276/2003 by their next friend GS [2004] HCA 49.
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Grewcock, M. (2018). Immigration Detention and the Limits of Human Rights. In: Stanley, E. (eds) Human Rights and Incarceration. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95399-1_5
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