A legal expert says the abuse revealed in harrowing footage at a youth detention centre in the Northern Territory almost certainly leaves Australia in breach of obligations the country has signed up to respect. 
Stripping teenagers naked, covering their heads with hoods, firing tear gas in a confined space, extended solitary confinement - all are practices likely to run foul of international human rights standards. The two most obvious are the International Covenant on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
Other treaties such as the elimination of racial discrimination could also be transgressed.
A respect for international law on human rights is the standard Australia regularly demands of other nations, so it can rightly expect to be criticised when such manifest failings are exposed.
"Absolutely, there is a clear and unequivocal breach," says Ruth Barson of the Human Rights Law Centre.
Not that international law should be seen as the key protection, as University of Melbourne legal professor Cheryl Saunders explains. "What is really essential is doing something about it at home," she says.
Australia has signed but never ratified an international convention that legal experts believe could genuinely help prevent the kind of abuse seen in the Four Corners episode on Monday.
Essentially, ratifying this new law would allow surprise inspections of a detention facility, either by a body appointed by the federal government or experts from the United Nations.
It has the rather unwieldy name of the "Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment" - or OPCAT for short.
That was 2009, when Australia signed on, but in the years since, successive governments have baulked at the prospect of the UN poking around inside Australian immigration detention centres.
Western Australia has effectively acted alone to achieve a similar end, creating the independent Office of the Inspector of Custodial Services.