Jenkings v Northern Territory of Australia I am delighted to have assisted in this class action representing detainees at the old and new Don Dale and the Holtze Youth Detention Centres which recently settled for $35M. Congratulations to Maurice Blackman and junior counsel Paul Batley for their commitment to this proceeding over many years.
Justice Mortimer refused the application of the NT government to suppress the settlement in a judgment describing the case in these terms - ‘This proceeding is itself about the administration of justice. It is about the exercise of public powers in respect of minors held in juvenile detention in the Northern Territory. It concerns the treatment of those minors while deprived of their liberty.
It is difficult to conceive of a piece of litigation which is more centrally concerned with the administration of justice than this one.
Here, those individuals were mostly Aboriginal, were minors, and were deprived of their liberty, when the impugned conduct occurred. In a civil society governed by the rule of law, those are additional reasons for a high level of transparency about how such a proceeding is proposed to be resolved. There should be informed public scrutiny of what has occurred, so that there may be informed public discussion of it – these are some of the proper consequences of open justice.