Australia juvenile detention scandal erupts

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Tuesday announced a Royal Commission, the country's highest-level state sanctioned investigation, after the video, aired as part of an investigation by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) triggered a national uproar.

CCTV footage which was mostly filmed at the Don Dale Youth Detention Center in the Northern Territory city of Darwin, showed guards mocking inmates, throwing a boy across a room on to a mattress and covering a teenager's head with a hood and leaving him shackled shirtless to a chair with neck, arm and leg restraints.

"We are determined to get to the bottom of this, we're determined to examine the extent to which there has been a culture of abuse and, indeed, whether there has been a culture of a cover-up," Turnbull told reporters. "Why was this abuse, this mistreatment, unrevealed for so long?"

Barrister John Lawrence told the ABC a child being hooded and cuffed was reminiscent of Guantanamo Bay, the US military prison that holds terror suspects.

"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.

The Northern Territory Chief Minister Adam Giles blamed a cover-up within the corrections system for the government's previous inaction and sacked the state's corrections minister within hours of the broadcast.

Treatment of Aboriginal people

But rights groups alleged that officials knew about the footage, which was filmed between 2010 and 2015, for years. It also raised the issue of the treatment of Aboriginal peoples. The Northern Territory has the highest rate of youth detention in the country and the vast majority of its juvenile detainees are of indigenous Australian descent.

"There is no cover-up. They've been fully aware of what's been going on," Priscilla Collins, the CEO of the North Australia Aboriginal Justice Agency told reporters, adding "The reports show it, the children's commissioner's report shows it. They had access to the footage."

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda said the report must be a "wake-up call" to everyone in Australia.

"Something's got to be done about the way we lock our people up in this country, and particularly the way we lock our kids up," he told reporters.

Turnbull said the Royal Commission was expected to start holding hearings in September and release its first report early next year.

se/rc (Reuters, AFP, AP)