This chapter explores how a network of human rights advocates used the Australian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities (2008) to protect children and young people’s human rights. The chapter documents the response of community and legal activist groups which began by rejecting the use by media and politicians of a vocabulary of ‘emergency’ and ‘exceptionality’ before challenging the government in a landmark legal case in Victoria’s Supreme Court heard in May 2017. We explore how the state sovereignty continually constrains or threatens popular sovereignty. Against the liberal self-portrait of a civic culture informed by the rule of law principle, this case highlights the way the political apparatus elevates politics above the law and any regard for human rights.