Issues

Mandatory Sentencing

• The mandatory sentencing laws operate only in Western Australia. The NT laws were repealed in 2002.
• On 8 March 1997, amendments to the NT Sentencing Act and the Juvenile Justice Act were proclaimed and came into effect.
• Under this law a minimum jail sentence is mandatory for 'property offences' (or in the case of juveniles for a second conviction), leaving judges and magistrates with no option but imprisonment for the most trivial of acts.
• Concerning the Territory Act any person over the age of 17 found guilty of the relevant property offence will be liable to a mandatory minimum term of imprisonment of 14 days for a first offence.
• White-collar crime, such as fraud, obtaining financial advantage by deception, and related offences, are not subject to mandatory sentencing.
• Mandatory sentencing laws are racially discriminatory, disrespectful of the law, morally abhorrent and unjust.
• Australia is in breach of its obligations to the UN and the international community.
• The mandatory sentencing laws are directly related to deaths in custody and the continued racial discrimination by Australia against Australia's Indigenous peoples.
• The legislation is in contravention of Australia's international obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In October, the UN Experts Committee on the Convention of the Rights of the Child was strongly critical of Australia's failure to implement the Convention. Coming in for specific criticism was the NT and it's system of mandatory sentencing, which is in clear breach of Articles 3, 37(b) and 40 of the Convention. They stipulate that imprisonment must be viewed as an option of absolute last resort.
• The legislation is also in clear contravention of Recommendation 92 of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which urges governments to enact legislation that ensures imprisonment is a sanction of "last resort". The NT government has continually held the Royal Commission's Recommendations in contempt, and has viewed them as irrelevant to the NT in spite of the massive over representation of Aboriginal people in Territory prisons.
• Mandatory sentencing snares the Aboriginal population at a disproportionately high rate. In WA, mandatory sentencing is 60 times more likely to land you in jail if you're Aboriginal.
• The Mandatory Sentencing Act takes the responsibility for law and order away from the local custodians of the law in each Aboriginal community in the Territory.
• Despite the Royal Commission's Inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and 339 recommendations later, Aboriginal people are still 14 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Aboriginal Australians. In the Northern Territory, 72.8 per cent of the prison population is Aboriginal. This compares with 33.1% in Western Australia and 21.6% in Queensland.
• In March and August 1999 the UN Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination (CERD) expressed the opinion that the federal native title amendments were racially discriminatory and breached articles 2 and 5 of the International Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The Federal Government has refused to recognise the Committee's view or even the validity of this Committee itself.

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