Vulnerable defendants before courts in the ACT will have access to specialist communication help later this year in an intermediary program a visiting international expert said would be world leading.
The ACT Human Rights Commission's intermediary program will expand in an Australian first to provide assistance to defendants later this year, after three years supporting witnesses.
John Taggart, a law lecturer at Queen's University Belfast, was in Canberra this week working with the ACT Human Rights Commission and holding meetings with the judiciary, police and lawyers on how the program would expand.
Dr Taggart said he believed it was inevitable other states and countries would look to the work in the ACT's program.
"The ACT is really leading the way here. Other states, I would expect, would follow. ... other countries as well will be looking to the ACT," Dr Taggart said.
Court intermediaries pair trained communication experts with vulnerable people to assist them in giving evidence or otherwise participating in the court process.
"Defendants are vulnerable. Defendants in the ACT are vulnerable in the same way as anywhere else, perhaps even more so because of the Aboriginal and First Nations disproportionate presence in the criminal process," Dr Taggart said.
"So to be able to have that impact and real-world impact is fantastic."
By the end of the year, the ACT Human Rights Commission will employ three more intermediaries as part of the expansion to help vulnerable defendants.
Intermediary program director Laura Cilesio said discussions this week were positive and the program was well received.
"The lawyers will always be the ones to ask the questions and take the intermediary advice, if you take the intermediary advice," Ms Cileso said.
"Police are the same. But I've seen particularly with police, the way that they've embraced the recommendations the intermediaries have been making particularly for younger cohorts, people with disability. The adjustments that have been made for people to give evidence has been extraordinary."
In one case, an intermediary assisted with a police interview of a five-year-old witness, advising police to bring in a tepee from the child's play area to the interview room and sit on the ground to have a "positive impact", the Human Rights Commission's annual report said.
The program matched all referrals, which can be made 24 hours a day, with an intermediary in 2021-22.
Almost 200 referrals came from police, 47 from the courts and one from a lawyer; 66 per cent of police referrals were for witnesses aged 15 and under, while 53 per cent of the referrals indicated mental health issues or trauma as communication issues.
Dr Taggart said there had been a precedent for some time that the adversarial system needed to adapt to meet the needs of witnesses, not the other way around.
"I think the key part is when criminal justice professionals - police, lawyers; that's prosecution, defence and judges - see how the role can actually have benefits for the property treatment of witnesses and defendants to ensure that there's access to justice, I think that takes time to bed in, but we're starting to see the fruits of that slowly but surely," he said.
Dr Taggart said change would take time, but the extension of providing intermediary support to defendants was a natural incremental step.
"But there's no going back to the way vulnerable witnesses and defendants used to be treated," he said.
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