Peter O’Brien, a solicitor representing Dylan Voller and 16-year-old Jake Roper has demanded his client’s release from jail.
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He was allegedly abused numerous times over a five-year period from October 2010.
Four Corners obtained footage of teens in 2014 at Don Dale Youth Detention Centre and again previous year in the old Berrimah adult prison that replaced Don Dale.
However, the Don Dale centre has been the subject of long-running complaints around the mistreatment of its underage inhabitants.
The prison officers filmed him being strapped into the chair by his ankles, wrists, shoulders and neck while wearing a “spit hood” to stop him spitting on them.
He was left in the room for nearly two hours by himself.
In one video, a 17-year-old child is hooded, shackled to a “mechanical device” chair and left alone for two hours.
Guard: “Might get the restraint chair possibly as well”.
CCTV obtained by Four Corners shows a prison guard attempting to hide the CCTV camera in Mr Voller’s cell with wet toilet paper before threatening and standing over the cowering boy on August 16, 2014. He was also held face down for three minutes in a hogtied position by one guard. One of the videos contain footage of the tear-gassing of six boys at Darwin’s Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in 2014 and has been restored upon further review, the representative said.
Not all the children were misbehaving – two boys can be seen on CCTV calmly playing cards before being exposed to the fumes.
Some of the boys assaulted in the Don Dale juvenile detention centre were Indigenous.
The PM said the commission would be established “as soon as possible”, working with NT Chief Minister Adam Giles, Attorney-General George Brandis, the Minister for Indigenous Affairs and Northern Territory Senator Nigel Scullion, and also Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs.
Barrister John Lawrence told the ABC a child being hooded and cuffed was reminiscent of Guantanamo Bay, the notorious U.S. military prison in Cuba that holds terror suspects. “It is a stain on our nation that in 2016 this type of gross inequality still exists in Australia, and we need to make changing this a national priority”.
Federal MPs are also concerned Australia’s human rights reputation has been “trashed” as confronting footage emerges of the treatment of some youths at a Northern Territory prison.
A still from the ABC Four Corners investigative report.
We want to know how this came about, we want to know what lessons can be learnt form it, we want to know why there were inquiries into this centre which did not turn the evidence and the information that we saw on Four Corners last night.
The ABC program likened the juvenile detention system to Guantanamo Bay in the USA showing footage of a 17-year-old strapped into a mechanical restraint chair in the Northern Territory’s Don Dale detention facility, along with a series of other videos, showing the repeated stripping, assault and mistreatment of him and other boys including the use of tear gas. “Our clients have suffered at the hands of those charged to protect them”, he added.
“Those circumstances have now been changed… we hope that they won’t be repeated”.
Triggs said the footage of the detention centres was “extremely distressing”. “I have never seen conditions of that kind and I have never seen people treated in that way”. The guard was heard saying to a coworker, “I’ll pulverise the f–er”.
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“That demonstrates a lack of training”, he told Four Corners.
