Australian Human Rights Commission Submission to UN Committee Against Torture, 17 October 2014 • • • retain that information to the extent necessary to make decisions in the course of the proceedings; use or weigh that information as part of the process of making decisions; and communicate decisions in some way. 68. The final report of the inquiry will be released shortly. 69. All Australian jurisdictions have enacted legislation dealing with fitness to stand trial. However, the legislation is considered to be complex and in some respects, ambiguous.49 The disparity between the legislation of the various states and territories adds further complications. It has been argued that a more streamlined and consistent approach to determining an accused's fitness to plead or stand trial would improve access to justice for people with disabilities, particularly people with intellectual disabilities, whose fitness to plead is likely to be an issue in criminal proceedings.50 Juvenile justice (a) Detention rates 70. The Commission remains concerned about rates of young people in detention. In 2012-13, there were 774 children aged 10-17 years in corrective detention on an average day in Australia.51 There is a particularly high number of children in detention in the Northern Territory and Western Australia compared to other states and territories.52 71. In 2011 the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs report Doing Time, Time for Doing: Indigenous youth in the criminal justice system,53 found that ‘the overrepresentation of Indigenous juveniles and young adults’ has worsened over the last 20 years.54 72. The National Children’s Commissioner has made a number of recommendations in her first Children’s Rights Report to Parliament,55 including that Australia consider raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility to an internationally acceptable level, remove children who are 17 years old from the adult justice system in Queensland, and establish a mechanism for investigating abuse at youth detention centres. (b) Separate custodial sites for children and young people 73. The Commission has expressed concern that all child offenders are still not held in separate correctional centres from adults.56 74. In 2013 the Commission intervened in proceedings in the Supreme Court of Western Australia to provide information on minimum standards in juvenile detention. The matter was a challenge of decisions to declare two units of an adult prison, Hakea Prison, as a juvenile detention centre and to transfer children to Hakea Prison from Banksia Hill Detention Centre. 57 In its submissions to the court, the Commission outlined specific areas of concern for children transferred to Hakea Prison. In particular, the Commission was 18