Australia’s prime minister has called for an investigation into allegations that teenagers were abused at a juvenile detention center in the country’s north.
Malcolm Turnbull also said on Tuesday that he would launch a Royal Commission after graphic footage emerged of teens being tear-gassed and stripped naked at a youth detention center in the Northern Territory, AP reported.
“Like all Australians, I have been deeply shocked; shocked and appalled by the images of mistreatment at the Don Dale center,” Turnbull said.
“We will be establishing a royal commission into these events, into this center. We intend to do so jointly with the Northern Territory government.
“We will get to the bottom of what happened here ... We want to know why there were inquiries into this center which did not turn up the evidence and the information that we saw on Four Corners last night.”
Royal commissions are Australia’s highest form of inquiry.
The footage aired on the Australian Broadcasting Corp.’s investigative program “Four Corners” on Monday.
One of the boys was hooded and cuffed to a mechanical restraint chair wearing a “spit hood”.
Northern Territory’s Attorney General John Elferink has been stripped of his corrections portfolio.
The report raised questions about an institutionalized culture of abuse at corrections centers in the Northern Territory, an administrative district that covers a large part of Australia’s north.
Human rights activists accused the government of ignoring the issue until it became public because the teens involved were indigenous. Northern Territory has the highest rate of youth detention in the country, and 97% of those detained are Aboriginal.
