The Australian Government has implemented overbroad foreign interference legislation which exempts politicians, while potentially making NGO reporting to UN bodies a national security offence,94 and restricts free speech on electoral matters. Australia must amend the foreign interference laws to exclude NGO advocacy and include politicians. Government-funded independent broadcasters ABC and SBS have been attacked politically and experienced significant funding cuts. Australia must restore funding to public broadcasters. The Australian Government has passed extensive laws requiring telecommunication companies to retain metadata and facilitate access to encrypted messages.95 It is considering a national database of photographs to enable law enforcement agencies to conduct facial recognition without adequate safeguards.96 Australia must repeal the metadata and encryption laws and severely restrict the use of facial recognition technology. The Australian Government continues to broaden laws stripping Australians of citizenship, without adequate procedural safeguards and sometimes retrospectively, placing them at an unacceptable risk of statelessness, family separation and indefinite detention.97 Australia must repeal citizenship deprivation laws. ACCESS TO JUSTICE AND THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM Legal assistance funding is inadequate. The separate Indigenous Legal Assistance Program is being wound up despite evaluation recommending retaining it.98 Australia must restore dedicated funding for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services. The legal assistance sector remains critically underfunded, with insufficient access to legal services to meet demand and provide redress for human rights abuses. Australia must implement the recommendations of the Productivity Commission to inject $200 million the legal assistance sector.99 The criminal justice system is failing young people, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, women, and people with disabilities. 100 Australia must reform the criminal justice system to make prison a last resort, and provide greater rehabilitative and diversionary options for overrepresented groups. It must address the overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, including by setting justice targets, funding a national Custody Notification Service, and ending mandatory sentences. Children are too often detained, subject to isolation and force, and not separated from adults.101 Australia must mandate separate detention of children from adults, review its juvenile justice systems against the CRC and CRPD,102 and implement all recommendations of the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory, within two years. Australia’s age of criminal responsibility is 10, contrasting with UN recommendations, 103 and medical evidence about children’s development.104 This disproportionately harms disadvantaged children. Australia must raise its minimum age of criminal responsibility to at least 14 within one year. 10