UN warns Australia is creating a new Stolen Generation

Detailed summary

A United Nations expert has slammed the Australian government for failing to protect Indigenous rights and says it is internationally embarrassing.

The mass incarceration of Indigenous children across Australia has been condemned by a United Nations human rights investigator as a generational failure.

UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Albert Barume was denied access to Darwin's Holtze and Queensland's Cleveland youth detention centres on his visit to Australia, which wrapped up on Friday.

He described the ongoing detention of Aboriginal children as a new Stolen Generation of children.

Statistics show First Nations youths remain heavily over-represented in detention nationwide.

"The state of protection of Indigenous people's rights... is really embarrassing," the Democratic Republic of Congo expert told reporters on Friday.

"I am convinced Indigenous peoples' rights are unsafe in the hands of states and territories.

"(Indigenous people) are not sure those rights, those gains, those progresses will survive the next (federal) election."

The federal government was duty-bound to institute a national, minimum mandatory standard for youth justice, he said.

"In certain prisons, 90 per cent are Indigenous peoples ... with some of those as young as 10-year-old kids," Dr Barume said.

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