Indefinite detention

Indefinite detention is the incarceration of an arrested person by a national government or law enforcement agency for an indefinite amount of time without a trial. The Human Rights Watch considers this practice as violating national and international laws, particularly human rights laws, although it remains in legislation in various liberal democracies.

In recent years, governments have indefinitely incarcerated individuals suspected of terrorism, often in black sites, sometimes declaring them enemy combatants – a notable example being the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Formalized forms of indefinite detention also exist in some countries around the world in the form of government-mandated administrative detention.

While laws that allow indefinite detention are present in many countries, including liberal democracies, human rights groups hold unfavorable views towards the practice.

In Australia, indefinite detention is unlawful and violates the Constitution.

In 1992, in the case of Chu Kheng Lim v Minister for Immigration, the High Court of Australia ruled that detention by the government can only be used to punish crimes. However, it found exceptions for non-citizens and possibly during non-peacetime.

In 1994, indefinite detention was introduced for Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cambodian refugees; previous laws had imposed a 273-day limit. The constitutional validity of this was challenged in the 2004 case of Al-Kateb v Godwin. It found that the indefinite detention of a stateless person is lawful. In 2023, this position was overruled in the case of NZYQ v Minister for Immigration. Instead, the High Court of Australia held that the indefinite detention of stateless persons is unlawful. Detention prior to deportation is only permitted when there are real prospects of successful deportation.

Human rights groups claim a history of forced labour, arbitrary arrest, and detention of minority groups, including Falun Gong members, Tibetans, Muslim minorities, political prisoners and other groups in the People's Republic of China. Notably, since at least 2017, more than one million Uyghurs and other minorities have been overwhelmingly detained without trial for the purposes of a "people's war on terror". In the case of the Falun Gong in particular, there have been claims of extraordinary abuses of human rights in concentration camps, including organ harvesting and systematic torture.

It was reported in July 2016 by Haaretz that 651 Palestinians were in Israeli jails without having been given due process, and that the number of Palestinians being detained in Israel without trial was on the rise. In October 2021, it was reported that Israel's Police Commissioner, Kobi Shabtai, was personally pushing for the use of detentions without trial, or "administrative detentions," by the Shin Bet security service to police Israel’s Arab communities.