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Sydney / AFP
The Australian government ordered an inquiry on Tuesday after graphic evidence emerged of prison guards assaulting teenage boys, with one shown hooded and shackled in scenes likened to Guantanamo Bay.
National broadcaster ABC showed footage of offenders, many indigenous, being stripped naked, tear-gassed and held in solitary confinement for weeks at a youth detention centre in the Northern Territory in 2014 and 2015.
In one video from last year, a 17-year-old is hooded, shackled to a restraint chair and left alone for two hours.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said he was “shocked and appalled” at the images from the ABC’s Four Corners current affairs programme.
“Like all Australians, I’ve been deeply shocked—shocked and appalled by the images of mistreatment of children at the Don Dale Centre,” he said.
Turnbull said a royal commission would be established along with the Northern Territory government to investigate the centre.
“This needs a thorough inquiry, we need to move quickly on that, get to the bottom of it and expose what occurred and expose the culture that allowed it to occur and allowed it to remain unrevealed for so long.”
Barrister John Lawrence told the ABC a child being hooded and cuffed was reminiscent of Guantanamo Bay, the notorious US military prison in Cuba that holds terror suspects.
“We’re talking about kids that are being shackled with handcuffs on their ankles, their wrists, their waist areas. They’re being shackled to chairs,” said Lawrence, an eminent lawyer and former president of the Northern Territory Bar Association.
“One of them has had the experience of sitting in one for just under two hours with a spit hood over his head, a la Guantanamo Bay,” he said.