Ankle bracelets and curfews on former immigration detainees will be stripped, with Australia’s highest court ruling them invalid.
The measures stemmed from a High Court decision that ruled indefinite detention was illegal and resulted in 215 immigration detainees being released as of October 18, 2024.
Of those, 143 have electronic monitoring bracelets and 126 are subject to a curfew after the federal government passed emergency legislation to add extra restrictions to the cohort.
The legislation overreached the separation of powers between the courts, which administer criminal punishment, and the commonwealth government, the High Court found.
Breaking bridging visa conditions, including electronic monitoring restrictions or a curfew, would result in a mandatory minimum one-year prison sentence.
“The imposition of each of the curfew condition and the monitoring condition on a (bridging visa R) is prima facie punitive and cannot be justified,” the High Court’s decision on Wednesday said.
The High Court bid was launched by a stateless Eritrean released from immigration detention under the previous court ruling in November 2023 and charged with six offences for failing to comply with curfew and monitoring.
The federal government had planned for all possible outcomes of the High Court case, including further legislation, Home Affairs Department legal counsel Clare Sharp said.
Neither curfew nor electronic monitoring applied to 64 people – 56 of whom previously had at least one of the restrictions, which has cost taxpayers more than $73 million.
But the removal of restrictions includes 28 people being taken into police custody.
Of the 215, there are 12 people convicted of murder or attempted murder, 66 for sexual offences, 97 for assault, 15 for serious drug offences, 15 for domestic violence and five for people smuggling. Five had low-level or no offences.
Since their release, 62 people have been re-detained at some point.
State and territory police have charged 65 people since their release – 20 of whom are on remand. The rest were in the community either on bail or because their case had been finalised.
The figure was “a truly shocking failure on community safety”, Liberal frontbencher James Paterson told AAP.
He chastised the government for not using emergency powers to apply for a preventative detention order that would re-detain people determined to be a high risk to the community.
“We are approaching the one-year anniversary of the parliament rushing through urgent legislation to give the Albanese government powers to protect the community from dangerous non-citizens,” he said.
“Yet Labor has still not applied to re-detain even one of the 12 murderers or 66 sex offenders released into the community.”
The first preventative detention application under emergency laws that passed parliament in December 2023 is expected in the coming weeks, Ms Sharp said.
She defended the time it took to complete a court application, saying there were a number of reasons why a case may have needed to be paused or delayed before it could be presented to a court.
These included whether it overlapped another criminal justice process or the person went into mental health care or a pathway for their removal from Australia began to open up.
At least one person is being targeted for deportation, Ms Sharp confirmed.
