Aged Care and the Convention Against Torture: ‘It Was Like Guantanamo Bay’

There is a relative absence of criminological engagement with aged care, both as a site of confinement and control, and a site where human rights are often routinely breached. Similarly, the Australian government is unwilling to include residential aged care sites within the remit of the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Instead, it relies on a narrow definition of ‘deprivation of liberty,’ applying the treaty only to what it terms ‘primary places of detention,’ thereby excluding aged care facilities. This chapter reflects upon this failure to include aged care sites under the ambit of the Convention while also calling upon criminologists to engage more attentively with such sites of care and the human rights breaches that they generate. Criminology delivers important insights into places of ‘care’ that share many characteristics with those purposed as punishment and detention. Nonetheless, a ‘criminology’ of human rights is misguided as long as it presumes that rights-based laws can always deliver on their promise. Accordingly, any research agenda within criminology must engage with the limits of human rights and, in particular, with how these limits are made manifest within carceral and confined sites.