Patrick McGee has recently had his Churchill Trust Report published: How to Dismantle and Replace Indefinite Detention of People with Cognitive Impairments. This report highlights how countries such as Canada, Sweden and Scotland respond to people with cognitive impairments who commit crimes and may be a risk of harm to others but are unfit to plead. The report documents the arbitrary detention that frames detention without end in Australia and the need to divert people with disability who commit crimes of misdemeanour should never be processed through the criminal justice system
This presentation identifies six key areas of reform for Australia to dismantle and replace indefinite detention such as decoupling unfitness to plead findings from detention without end, improving the safeguarding of people with disability in indefinite detention and how the NDIS Complex Needs and Justice Pathways provide a funded platform to both divert people with cognitive impairments from indefinite detention and provide a pathway out of indefinite detention and into safe and secure accommodation and support in the community. Importantly this report discusses Canada’s Gladue Principles which created a system of culturally informed pre-sentence reports for all First Nations Canadians who come before the courts.
Presenters
Patrick McGee
– Churchill Fellow, Australians for Disability and Justice, Australia
Patrick McGee is a Churchill Fellow who investigated how to dismantle and replace indefinite detention of people with cognitive impairments in Australia’s places of detention. Whilst on the Churchill Scholarship he participated in the 2022 review of Australia’s compliance with the Convention Against Torture in Geneva. In 2023 as a result of this advocacy, he worked with the University of New South Wales and the Australian Human Rights Commission to develop a National Forum on Cruel Inhuman and Degrading Treatment of People with Disability in Australia’s Places of Detention.
Patrick McGee works as a disability and justice navigator supporting people with cognitive impairments and psycho-social disability who indefinitely detained are in Australia’s detention system’s particularly the states and territories forensic detention system. Patrick McGee has a particular passion for supporting First Nations people with disability and psycho-social disability who are indefinitely detained and vulnerable to cruel inhuman and degrading treatment and has been working in the Northen Territory for over decades with central Australian Indigenous communities.
