NZYQ: The plaintiff’s legal team, along with the legal teams of the Commission and the HRLC/Kaldor Centre that travelled to Canberra, outside Court 1 shortly after the orders were pronounced. made in one reporting year, and the final judgement in the matter may be determined in the following. The two narratives of change provided below show the long arc of the Commission’s impact through advocacy and collaboration to bring about systemic change in our legal and policy frameworks to address human rights impacts. The first example is an outcome of a submission to the court in which the Commission appeared as a friend (amicus curiae) of the High Court of Australia in the 2022-23 reporting period, in the case of NZYQ v Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs. This narrative of change example highlights the impacts of the Commission’s human rights advice after long-term and collaborative advocacy efforts. This is also demonstrated in the second example, a case of compensation for Indonesian children detained as adults, where the evidence and reporting work of the Commission contributed to human rights remedies for children wrongly treated as adults by the Australian justice system. NZYQ v Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs [2023] HCA 37 The High Court of Australia case NZYQ was about whether it was lawful for the Australian Government to lock up a person in immigration detention indefinitely, and potentially for the rest of their lives, because they don’t have a visa and cannot be returned to their home country. In a landmark decision, the High Court ruled that the indefinite detention of people in immigration detention was unlawful. The Commission was granted leave to appear as amicus curiae to provide written and oral submissions. The High Court decision in NZYQ unanimously overturned a 20-year-old precedent: the case of Al-Kateb v Godwin, which had previously ruled that migration laws authorised the indefinite detention of a person who was an unlawful non-citizen, even if there was no real prospect of removing them from Australia in the reasonably foreseeable future. The Commission appeared in the Al-Kateb case and in three of the four cases considered by the High Court since then that sought to overturn it. In each of the cases prior to NZYQ, the High Court decided Annual Report 2023–2024 • 31

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