The Victorian Ombudsman has detailed human rights breaches linked to enforcement of COVID-19 public health directions, including a woman who was forced to urinate into a bottle while being transported to hotel quarantine.
The cases are among dozens detailed in a report by the Ombudsman, Deborah Glass, tabled in the Victorian Parliament.
Ms Glass said the response to the COVID-19 pandemic had put public servants under pressure, and they sometimes did not put people at the heart of their decision making.
She said the case of the woman who had to urinate into a bottle was an example of "harried public servants not thinking."
"In this case, was it right for them to have limited her freedom of movement to go into hotel quarantine? Yes it probably was. But was it right for her to be unable to use the bathroom? No, plainly not," she told ABC Radio Melbourne.
"People are likely to have to use the bathroom, so come up with a COVID-safe way of making sure people have access to a bathroom."
In another case, a woman in a wheelchair waited four hours at a COVID-19 testing site where there were no wheelchair accessible toilets.
She was told she would have to rejoin at the back of the queue if she left to find a wheelchair accessible bathroom.
"This is an unthinking, bureaucratic response, but to the department's credit, when we pointed this out to them they very quickly realised the error of their ways, very quickly apologised," Ms Glass said.
Still no apology for public housing lockdown
The Ombudsman has again urged the state government to apologise to residents of public housing towers who were subjected to a snap lockdown in July 2020.
In her report on the incident, Ms Glass found that the 3,000 affected residents were not given appropriate notice about the lockdown, and many had been left traumatised by the experience.
"I'm disappointed that we've seen no apology to those residents, it would have gone a long way to acknowledging that people's human rights were breached," she said.
The report tabled in parliament today also details a number of human rights breaches within Victoria's prison system and immigration detention centres.
One of the breaches involved a female prisoner who needed to move into a protection unit to separate her from prisoners who wanted to harm her.
Because of a shortage of beds, she was instead moved into a management unit for prisoners who had exhibited difficult behaviour, and was subjected to 22-hour lockdowns and was not allowed to have a prison job.
In another case, a male prisoner who had wet the bed during a seizure was given a change of clothes but was made to sleep in the wet bedding overnight.
