What can you recommend watching?
- Thread starter The GOAT
- Start date
Well that makes one then.
Listen to his last few sentences and try and marry them with Hamas or indeed the Muslim Religion generally - I look forward to your synopsis
I haven't watched it nor heard of him before.
I'll book the time off in February to fit it in.
If Everqueer was praising him, I can imagine what it will be like.
Does anyone know why they stopped putting golliwogs on jam jars?
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No the migrants where using them as passport photo's.They became extinctDam climate change
i’m gonna call Greta the doom goblin
Well allow me to assist you in your ignorance.
The 2013 Human Rights Oration
Delivered by Geoffrey Robertson QC
19 November 2013
Thank you, John, for that overkind introduction – certainly kinder than the one I got in Glasgow the other day, where the chairman, with a very pronounced Scottish accent, said to the audience, “I want to introduce a distinguished liar”.
Well, it’s a great privilege to give this lecture to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document which Australians helped to draft, and which was handed by Eleanor Roosevelt to the President of the General Assembly of the United Nations on December the 10th, 1948. That President was Dr H V Evatt, the Australian Foreign Minister, who presciently predicted that it would become the “Magna Carta for mankind”. He said millions of women, men and children would look at it in future times for inspiration and protection against oppression. It was a charter that emerged, optimistically, from the worst of human rights abuses in the Nazi gas chambers, and it was the way the world then said, “Never again. Never again will we tolerate genocide or torture or mass murder, and we will not tolerate those lesser incursions on individual freedom from which these greater evils spring if they are tolerated”.
If we shrug our shoulders and say, as the Australian Prime Minister said in Colombo a couple of days ago – I quote – “Sometimes in difficult circumstances, difficult things happen”. Human rights atrocities are not “difficult things”. They are evils, and the Universal Declaration enjoins us to condemn them. And I want, in this lecture today, to talk about a few difficult things of the moment. Who guards the guardians – the guardians … the Australian guardians who thought it right to hack into the telephones of our Indonesian allies. I want also to say a few words about gunboat diplomacy, by which I mean giving gun boats to unrepentant human rights violators. And I want to outline the latest – and I think interesting and optimistic – development in human rights, that targets what I’d call the train drivers to Auschwitz – not the leaders, but the lesser figures who obey orders, and if they can be deterred from obeying such orders by what is now called a Magnitsky law, Australia can join the international movement to adopt one, that I suggest will be a very important development.
I should first perhaps apologise for my accent. I am, as Private Eye puts it, an Australian who’s had a vowel transplant. But that comes from all the time of bowing and scraping in the English courts. My very first case I had to do at the Old Bailey was to defend a fellow who was convicted of wearing an indecent t-shirt, and I had to explain to a terrifying appeal judge – High Court judge – what the case was all about. And I spoke with pronounced … you know, those irritable Australian vowels – France and branch – and I said to him, “My Lord, this is a case about a t-shirt which had the logo ‘F*ck art, let’s dance’”. And there was this terrifying silence. And the judge said, “F*ck art, let’s what, Mr Robertson?” And I said, “Dance, My Lord, dance”. There was another terrifying silence and he said, “Oh, you’re an Australian. What you’ll have to learn to say, Mr Robertson, if you’re going to succeed at the English Bar is f*ck art, let’s dahnce”.
Well I felt sorry for Alexander Downer when he briefly became leader of the opposition and had to hire a voice coach to change his vowels from BBC English to Channel Nine Australian and teach him to say “dance”.
And … well, to amputate his polysyllables. It’s just too hot in Australia to say all of a long word. But now I’m what is described as a dual citizen, by which it means I can have my prostate felt in Harley Street in London and my teeth examined in Sydney’s Macquarie Street, because if you look at English teeth you’ll understand why. I’m one of a million, actually, Australian expatriates. We’re certainly not ex-patriots - when tragedy strikes the sunburned country we grieve; we are lassoed by the umbilical coil. It was my wife who organised that ceremony in Westminster Abbey a couple of years ago for the Victoria fire victims. And we do feel for this country and we feel pride. We also sometimes, unfortunately, feel shame.
It’s a great pleasure to be here in Victoria, in modern Victoria. A particular pleasure because I grew up in Sydney in the ‘60s, when Victoria really was another country. Henry Bolte was busy hanging people, while Arthur Rylah, the Attorney General, insisted that nothing should enter the state that would be unsuitable for his 14-year-old daughter. Now I wrote for Oz magazine, which was published in Sydney, and before the magazine could be distributed in Melbourne Gordon and Gotch, the distributors, had to black out words like “vagina”, lest Mr Rylah’s daughter might discover that she had one. It was the time of the Vietnam War, and I remember my first article for Oz was a satire on the hawks and doves in the political aviary, and it was illustrated by Garry Shead, who’s now, of course, a wonderful famous Australian painter. But he depicted LBJ and Harold Holt as birds of prey, with long-slung bombs in the form of testicles.
And Gordon and Gotch insisted on blacking out all Garry Shead’s testicles before they could pass the line at Albury-Wodonga. Well, testicles and music were to come together later in my legal career in Britain when I defended Richard Branson after Virgin Records had been charged with indecency for promoting the cover of a record Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. And they argued that bollocks was an indecent word. So I called a professor of the English language to describe to the court the etymology of the good old English word bollocks – how it had been used in the meaning of testicles in the Caxton edition of the Bible, in the Song of Solomon, and … but in the King James edition it had been replaced by the word “stones”, at which Richard Branson passed me a note saying, “Geoff, don’t worry if we lose the case; we’ll retitle the album Never Mind the Stones, Here’s the Sex Pistols”.
Anyway, in my youth in Sydney we joked about Melbourne’s cultural pretensions – a city without an opera house. We were building the Sydney Opera House, which we then turned into a big recital hall with a small opera theatre on the side. It couldn’t, of course, manage The Ring Cycle, but Sydney has solved the problem of its impossible opera house by actually moving opera out onto the water. It’s sort of pontoon opera, where you can see the best of the Opera House, which is its exterior, in the background. And since you can’t have a successful cultural event in Sydney without fireworks, and fireworks would be a safety hazard inside the opera theatre, you can now come and watch fireworks against the silhouette of the Opera House and get opera performance as a kind of optional extra. But Sydney certainly couldn’t stage the greatest musical drama of all time, The Ring Cycle, which Melbourne last night triumphantly managed.
/continued
Sydney’s cynics rather wondered where you’d stage it. We assumed you’d put it in the MCG – better interval entertainment that Meatloaf. Or maybe the Rod Laver Tennis Centre, where the Valkyries could get to Valhalla before the roof closed, or maybe you’d test out the acoustic at Flinders Street Railway Station. …the plans for the new station look rather like a concrete U-boat. But last night at the State Theatre you pulled it off. Well, achievements like that – with an international audience – make us proud to be Australians. But we should feel equally proud at the way Australians helped to write the Universal Declaration.
In England earlier this year I launched the Cambridge University Press three-volume publication of the travaux préparatoires, the transcripts of all those drafting debates back in 1946 and 1947 ad 1948. And I felt really proud to read the contributions by so many Australians – the cantankerous Colonel Hodgson, the quick-witted Alan Watt, that great Australian feminist Jessie Street – all part of the Australian delegation, building on Doc Evatt’s reputation at the San Francisco conference which established the UN. It was this gravel-voiced Australian who dominated it, who became the leader of the small- and middle-ranking nations. The American Secretary of State, Ed Stettinius, said – and I quote – “No one has contributed to the United Nations conference more than Dr Evatt”. And the New York Times declared that Australia represented, through Evatt – I quote – “the force of ideas, argument and intellectual effort that would be necessary to build a better post-war world”.
Australia’s great contribution to the text was to write the economic and social rights section, and to … moreover, to persuade the Americans that economic and social rights belonged in the Universal Declaration. Evatt was appalled when he found that the first draft has missed out any right to join trade unions, and he insisted that that be added in Article 22, and at the prompting of Jessie Street, that they added the right to equal pay for equal work. And Article 25 was very much an Australian inspiration – the right to an adequate standard of living, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and benefits in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood or old age.
Well these were Australia’s achievements back in 1948. It was Evatt and his team that put Australia on the map – not Gallipoli, not Billy Hughes’ rantings at Versailles. It was at this time when Australia had only seven million people and we led the world in our ability to understand and articulate human rights. Evatt was also the architect of the Genocide Convention, which … because he took Raphael Lemkin under his wing – no one else could stand him... He was the author of the idea of genocide, and it was under Evatt’s patronage that the Genocide Convention was written. And Evatt was the President of the United Nations at the time the great human rights triptych came together – the Genocide Convention, 9th of December 1948; the Human Rights Universal Declaration the next day; the Geneva Conventions three months later.
Well, of course, unfortunately these conventions of the time had no enforcement machinery, and they went into cold storage during the Cold War. That was the period when we had, of course, a host of good conventions – we elaborated the Universal Declaration in conventions about children, about women, against torture, against apartheid. These were the good conventions. As someone said, looking at the killing fields of Rwanda, “The road to hell is paved with good conventions”.
But it was after the fall of Communism, when ethnic wars broke out, UN diplomacy – anyone’s diplomacy – were helpless and hopeless. There was that black joke I heard in Sarajevo in 1992, actually: What do you do with a man who murders his wife? Well you put him in prison for life. What do you do with a man who kills 20 people? You put him in a mental asylum until he’s cured. What do you do with a man who kills 200,000 people? Oh, you send him to a luxury hotel in Geneva for peace negotiations. That was a black joke told about Milosevic. And it got blacker.
But then the idea of picking up the Nuremberg legacy, the court at Nuremberg, where I’m now a trustee of the court where they put the Nazi leaders … convicted the Nazi leaders, came up again – it came initially in the early ‘90s as a bit of a fig leaf, as how desperate the UN was to do something about the Balkan wars. But it came together with the Pinochet arrest. That was quite revolutionary, to be able to arrest a head of state. It was particularly, I suppose, satisfying for me. I acted for Human Rights Watch in that case, and in 1999 – 25 years before – when I had joined Amnesty International, and my first task was to write a begging letter to General Pinochet: “Please close your torture chambers”.
So in a quarter of a century human rights law had developed to a stage when, instead of Amnesty grovelling and writing these begging letters, “Dear Professor/Excellency/Idi Amin/DCV/DSCV/VC and Bar, will you please do something about the inquest on the judges that were thrown … found floating in the river outside Kampala, after you … they’d produced an opinion, which I can well understand that you’re Excellency might take offence with”. You know this was what we did in the 1970s – “Please, please, please” – and they never opened or answered our letters. But 25 years later we had them under house arrest, or at least under mansion arrest. John Howard, I remember at the time his only comment was, “They didn’t teach me that they could arrest leaders of state at law school”. Well, they didn’t; we were witnessing, I think, a millennial shift from expediency, from diplomacy, to international justice.
And since then, Milosevic and Mladic, and Karadjic at the moment. My court indicted Charles Taylor for the vicious crimes in Sierra Leone, and he’s now serving his sentence in a British prison. So international justice is here to stay, although there are challenges, there are teething problems. The ICC is still too weak. And I’d like to salute Melinda Taylor, a very courageous Australian barrister who was instructed by the ICC – she was working there in the defence unit – because defence … it is important that, however horrible people are made out to be by the media, that they have proper defences – and she was instructed to represent Saif Qaddafi, and she spent a month under the gun as a hostage in Libya before the ICC managed to get her released. It’s heartening to see so many brave young Australian expatriates, like Melinda, working in aid agencies, at the UN, in various places in the world, and in NGOs, working in the battle to build a better world, proudly carrying the banner of Doc Evatt and Jessie Street.
And looking back on Australia, what do they see? Well, today they see a nation mired in controversy over the invading the privacy of leaders of a friendly country. Yesterday a nation – the only main Commonwealth nation that stood shoulder to shoulder with the Rajapaksa government of Sri Lanka, an unrepentant human rights violator.
So let’s briefly look at these two issues, and look at them apolitically, because the hacking took place by order of – or at least on the watch of – the Rudd government, the first Rudd government. And Bob Carr, who wouldn’t know a human right if he fell over it, is boasting today that he too would have given the Rajapaskas their gunboats.
Sydney’s cynics rather wondered where you’d stage it. We assumed you’d put it in the MCG – better interval entertainment that Meatloaf. Or maybe the Rod Laver Tennis Centre, where the Valkyries could get to Valhalla before the roof closed, or maybe you’d test out the acoustic at Flinders Street Railway Station. …the plans for the new station look rather like a concrete U-boat. But last night at the State Theatre you pulled it off. Well, achievements like that – with an international audience – make us proud to be Australians. But we should feel equally proud at the way Australians helped to write the Universal Declaration.
In England earlier this year I launched the Cambridge University Press three-volume publication of the travaux préparatoires, the transcripts of all those drafting debates back in 1946 and 1947 ad 1948. And I felt really proud to read the contributions by so many Australians – the cantankerous Colonel Hodgson, the quick-witted Alan Watt, that great Australian feminist Jessie Street – all part of the Australian delegation, building on Doc Evatt’s reputation at the San Francisco conference which established the UN. It was this gravel-voiced Australian who dominated it, who became the leader of the small- and middle-ranking nations. The American Secretary of State, Ed Stettinius, said – and I quote – “No one has contributed to the United Nations conference more than Dr Evatt”. And the New York Times declared that Australia represented, through Evatt – I quote – “the force of ideas, argument and intellectual effort that would be necessary to build a better post-war world”.
Australia’s great contribution to the text was to write the economic and social rights section, and to … moreover, to persuade the Americans that economic and social rights belonged in the Universal Declaration. Evatt was appalled when he found that the first draft has missed out any right to join trade unions, and he insisted that that be added in Article 22, and at the prompting of Jessie Street, that they added the right to equal pay for equal work. And Article 25 was very much an Australian inspiration – the right to an adequate standard of living, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and benefits in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood or old age.
Well these were Australia’s achievements back in 1948. It was Evatt and his team that put Australia on the map – not Gallipoli, not Billy Hughes’ rantings at Versailles. It was at this time when Australia had only seven million people and we led the world in our ability to understand and articulate human rights. Evatt was also the architect of the Genocide Convention, which … because he took Raphael Lemkin under his wing – no one else could stand him... He was the author of the idea of genocide, and it was under Evatt’s patronage that the Genocide Convention was written. And Evatt was the President of the United Nations at the time the great human rights triptych came together – the Genocide Convention, 9th of December 1948; the Human Rights Universal Declaration the next day; the Geneva Conventions three months later.
Well, of course, unfortunately these conventions of the time had no enforcement machinery, and they went into cold storage during the Cold War. That was the period when we had, of course, a host of good conventions – we elaborated the Universal Declaration in conventions about children, about women, against torture, against apartheid. These were the good conventions. As someone said, looking at the killing fields of Rwanda, “The road to hell is paved with good conventions”.
But it was after the fall of Communism, when ethnic wars broke out, UN diplomacy – anyone’s diplomacy – were helpless and hopeless. There was that black joke I heard in Sarajevo in 1992, actually: What do you do with a man who murders his wife? Well you put him in prison for life. What do you do with a man who kills 20 people? You put him in a mental asylum until he’s cured. What do you do with a man who kills 200,000 people? Oh, you send him to a luxury hotel in Geneva for peace negotiations. That was a black joke told about Milosevic. And it got blacker.
But then the idea of picking up the Nuremberg legacy, the court at Nuremberg, where I’m now a trustee of the court where they put the Nazi leaders … convicted the Nazi leaders, came up again – it came initially in the early ‘90s as a bit of a fig leaf, as how desperate the UN was to do something about the Balkan wars. But it came together with the Pinochet arrest. That was quite revolutionary, to be able to arrest a head of state. It was particularly, I suppose, satisfying for me. I acted for Human Rights Watch in that case, and in 1999 – 25 years before – when I had joined Amnesty International, and my first task was to write a begging letter to General Pinochet: “Please close your torture chambers”.
So in a quarter of a century human rights law had developed to a stage when, instead of Amnesty grovelling and writing these begging letters, “Dear Professor/Excellency/Idi Amin/DCV/DSCV/VC and Bar, will you please do something about the inquest on the judges that were thrown … found floating in the river outside Kampala, after you … they’d produced an opinion, which I can well understand that you’re Excellency might take offence with”. You know this was what we did in the 1970s – “Please, please, please” – and they never opened or answered our letters. But 25 years later we had them under house arrest, or at least under mansion arrest. John Howard, I remember at the time his only comment was, “They didn’t teach me that they could arrest leaders of state at law school”. Well, they didn’t; we were witnessing, I think, a millennial shift from expediency, from diplomacy, to international justice.
And since then, Milosevic and Mladic, and Karadjic at the moment. My court indicted Charles Taylor for the vicious crimes in Sierra Leone, and he’s now serving his sentence in a British prison. So international justice is here to stay, although there are challenges, there are teething problems. The ICC is still too weak. And I’d like to salute Melinda Taylor, a very courageous Australian barrister who was instructed by the ICC – she was working there in the defence unit – because defence … it is important that, however horrible people are made out to be by the media, that they have proper defences – and she was instructed to represent Saif Qaddafi, and she spent a month under the gun as a hostage in Libya before the ICC managed to get her released. It’s heartening to see so many brave young Australian expatriates, like Melinda, working in aid agencies, at the UN, in various places in the world, and in NGOs, working in the battle to build a better world, proudly carrying the banner of Doc Evatt and Jessie Street.
And looking back on Australia, what do they see? Well, today they see a nation mired in controversy over the invading the privacy of leaders of a friendly country. Yesterday a nation – the only main Commonwealth nation that stood shoulder to shoulder with the Rajapaksa government of Sri Lanka, an unrepentant human rights violator.
So let’s briefly look at these two issues, and look at them apolitically, because the hacking took place by order of – or at least on the watch of – the Rudd government, the first Rudd government. And Bob Carr, who wouldn’t know a human right if he fell over it, is boasting today that he too would have given the Rajapaskas their gunboats.
/continued
Well, who guards the guardians? This … we have Edward Snowden to thank for revealing that we live in the world that Orwell dreamed of, where there is no hiding place for any electronic communication. He revealed the Prism, which picks up your conversation if you use any one of 70,000 key words that it automatically hoovers up for storage and subsequent reading. If you say “Bin Laden” on your telephone conversation with your lover, that will be swept up. If you say “Assange”, it will be swept up. And there are 70,000 other words that Prism is calculated to pick up. Now, not only conversations of that kind. At some point the decision makers – we don’t know quite who they are – in the arrangement, which is basically Britain and America, with Australia, Canada and New Zealand thrown in, decided it would be a good idea to pick up the conversations – the private conversations – on mobile telephones of world leaders, beginning with Angela Merkel.
Now, Ms Merkel is a formidable and formidably conservative Prime Minister, a leader in many ways of democracy in Europe. And what was wanted from her was of course not terrorist intelligence. None of this has anything to do with terrorism. It has to do with picking up gossip and tittle-tattle and feeding that to politicians. That’s what it’s all about. And, of course, it is ironic that the first public victim – I say public because I understand there have been a lot of private victims, who maybe even don’t know that they’re victims of the gossip and tittle-tattle – but the first public victim was none other than General Petraeus. He was the best solider that America had. He was about to be made head of the CIA. And on his metadata, which is the records they could get of everyone who ever calls him or he ever calls, they discovered that he’s been having an affair with his biographer, which disqualified him from the CIA.
Think Blanche de’Alpuget. But in Puritan America, that did for him. Well, now we have DSD, our defence intelligence service, and the revelation of the fact that in 2009 they were boasting – and I’ve seen the document, and it is really a very boastful PowerPoint presentation – of how they, the intelligent Australians, were able to bug the mobile phone of the wife of the Indonesian ambassador. My first instinct – my first advice – was, “No, this is some sort of plant”. I mean on every page they had this moronic, puerile motto stamped heavily, “Steal their secrets. Keep ours”. I said, “These are intelligent Australians. They wouldn’t have a motto as corny as that on every page”. Well, of course they do. And this is interesting because if you think about it, there is nothing to do with terrorism, there is nothing to do with Australia’s national security, that could rationally be gleaned from the mobile phone of the wife of the Indonesian Prime Minister.
What, her shopping list? The idea they’re learning about her health and her children’s health? Come on. How could that ever be thought of to be capable … what’s the law here? What’s the … who guards the guardians? What d*ckhead made this decision? Because look at the consequences.
Well, the problem … I looked at the Australian Security Act last night and, bizarrely, there are some protections for Australians, but basically DSD can do what it likes to non-Australians – they can bug Angelina Jolie or Richard Branson or the English cricket captain, to discover from his mobile phone transcripts what his tactics are for in the First Test. That would probably be more defensible than bugging the wife of the Indonesian leader.
So let’s actually step back and consider whether this was, in fact, a decision, whoever made it, that was stupid, that was ethically wrong, and was unlawful. It was stupid, because you’ve seen what has happened. It is a diplomatic stand-off that is crazy for Australia to have with its closest neighbour, and when it is so dependant on that neighbour, not only for corporate work – for coal and all sorts of resources – Australian companies are put in jeopardy in Indonesia, thanks to this decision. So … and unethical? Well, privacy – the protection of personal privacy – is an international … it’s in every human rights treaty. It is … other professions – lawyers, even accountants – have codes of ethics. But that’s something that diplomats don’t have, and spooks really need.
There is this James Bond idea that they’re licensed to kill, they can be licensed to do anything, and we give them a carte blanche because we think that they’re spending their time on terrorism. Quite clearly they’re not. In this case they were spending their time on tittle-tattle, and hoovering it up from the Australian Embassy in Indonesia, which was a breach of international law, a breach of the Vienna Convention, and even more interestingly, I think, a breach of the Australian law. I’ve been looking at it, as I say, and even in relation to overseas figures, they are confined to the requirements of government and the requirements of the defence force for obtaining electronic intelligence. So where were … which government required it? Mr Rudd, I think, although it started in 2007, according to the document, so there may have been some question of changeover.
But it was … who issued an authorisation requiring the tapping of the telephone of the Indonesian politicians and the Prime Minister’s wife? What happened to oversight? We set up a great oversight after the last ASIO bungle, after the Hope Commission. We set up an Inspector General of the Security Services, who’s a human rights lawyer from the University of New South Wales. What’s she doing? Let her speak out if she’s not some utter cipher, because how come she didn’t know that we were bugging the Indonesian politicians? We’ve got a Parliamentary Committee. Much good that’s been. All sorts of so-called guardians, that obviously have no impact on guardianship of the intelligence services.
I think what Mr Abbott must do is confess, because the document is obviously genuine. Here is DSD boasting. And one of the extraordinary thing is that this top-secret document gets into the hands of a 29-year-old private contractor, it’s distributed so widely. So the first thing he’s got to do is the question of incompetence – the incompetence of allowing these secrets to get out to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. But, really, what he has to do with Indonesia is admit – just as Obama did in relation to Merkel – and to promise, “We will not, now or at any time in the future, intercept your mobile telephones”. But I think he’s got to go further. It’s … he can’t continue with this nonsense, “Oh, everyone does it”.
How would we feel if Therese Rein’s phone had been tapped by the Indonesians? Look, that’s simply not good enough. There is a right to privacy, and we have violated it.
But the second thing he’s got to do is set up an enquiry: Who decided on that stupid decision to bug those telephones? Was it a Minister? Was it Mr Rudd himself? It may well have been. He was once a diplomat. What minister, or who in DSD, decided that it required … that there was a requirement that Australia bug that mobile phone? And who … I suppose the third thing is that why didn’t DSD realise that it was plainly unlawful, it was outside any rational interpretation of their statutory powers in articles 7 and 8 of the Security and Intelligence Act? And the next thing the enquiry must decide is what is to be done to hold them accountable? And how come it … the guardians of the intelligence service, set up by the Hope Report, failed so abjectly to identify this improper behaviour and to deal with it? The Inspector General of Security, the Parliamentary Committee, there’s even a Ministerial Security Adviser – all statutory positions, all guardians who have failed in their duty to ensure that Australian intelligence collects intelligence on our enemies, and not the tittle-tattle from our friends.
Or did we just do it because the Americans told us to? Well, there they are. It seems to me the important questions, as we enter this Orwellian world where state agencies can monitor everything we say. But President Obama, to his great credit, has said that Snowden has produced a debate we have to have. And that’s why he told Mrs Merkel that the United States does not now, and will not in the future, hack her mobile phone, whatever it may have done in that past. And that’s what Mr Abbott should say to the President and his wife: We were caught red-handed using the sort of tactics that journalists from Mr Murdoch’s press are on trial at the Old Bailey as we speak for doing – for hacking private telephones. And we set up the inquiry into who decided to do it, and we sack them if we find them, or we don’t re-elect them, and why our so-called guardians failed to stop it. In that way perhaps we can restore a trust that is necessary between nations who genuinely want to work to stop human rights abuses.
Well, who guards the guardians? This … we have Edward Snowden to thank for revealing that we live in the world that Orwell dreamed of, where there is no hiding place for any electronic communication. He revealed the Prism, which picks up your conversation if you use any one of 70,000 key words that it automatically hoovers up for storage and subsequent reading. If you say “Bin Laden” on your telephone conversation with your lover, that will be swept up. If you say “Assange”, it will be swept up. And there are 70,000 other words that Prism is calculated to pick up. Now, not only conversations of that kind. At some point the decision makers – we don’t know quite who they are – in the arrangement, which is basically Britain and America, with Australia, Canada and New Zealand thrown in, decided it would be a good idea to pick up the conversations – the private conversations – on mobile telephones of world leaders, beginning with Angela Merkel.
Now, Ms Merkel is a formidable and formidably conservative Prime Minister, a leader in many ways of democracy in Europe. And what was wanted from her was of course not terrorist intelligence. None of this has anything to do with terrorism. It has to do with picking up gossip and tittle-tattle and feeding that to politicians. That’s what it’s all about. And, of course, it is ironic that the first public victim – I say public because I understand there have been a lot of private victims, who maybe even don’t know that they’re victims of the gossip and tittle-tattle – but the first public victim was none other than General Petraeus. He was the best solider that America had. He was about to be made head of the CIA. And on his metadata, which is the records they could get of everyone who ever calls him or he ever calls, they discovered that he’s been having an affair with his biographer, which disqualified him from the CIA.
Think Blanche de’Alpuget. But in Puritan America, that did for him. Well, now we have DSD, our defence intelligence service, and the revelation of the fact that in 2009 they were boasting – and I’ve seen the document, and it is really a very boastful PowerPoint presentation – of how they, the intelligent Australians, were able to bug the mobile phone of the wife of the Indonesian ambassador. My first instinct – my first advice – was, “No, this is some sort of plant”. I mean on every page they had this moronic, puerile motto stamped heavily, “Steal their secrets. Keep ours”. I said, “These are intelligent Australians. They wouldn’t have a motto as corny as that on every page”. Well, of course they do. And this is interesting because if you think about it, there is nothing to do with terrorism, there is nothing to do with Australia’s national security, that could rationally be gleaned from the mobile phone of the wife of the Indonesian Prime Minister.
What, her shopping list? The idea they’re learning about her health and her children’s health? Come on. How could that ever be thought of to be capable … what’s the law here? What’s the … who guards the guardians? What d*ckhead made this decision? Because look at the consequences.
Well, the problem … I looked at the Australian Security Act last night and, bizarrely, there are some protections for Australians, but basically DSD can do what it likes to non-Australians – they can bug Angelina Jolie or Richard Branson or the English cricket captain, to discover from his mobile phone transcripts what his tactics are for in the First Test. That would probably be more defensible than bugging the wife of the Indonesian leader.
So let’s actually step back and consider whether this was, in fact, a decision, whoever made it, that was stupid, that was ethically wrong, and was unlawful. It was stupid, because you’ve seen what has happened. It is a diplomatic stand-off that is crazy for Australia to have with its closest neighbour, and when it is so dependant on that neighbour, not only for corporate work – for coal and all sorts of resources – Australian companies are put in jeopardy in Indonesia, thanks to this decision. So … and unethical? Well, privacy – the protection of personal privacy – is an international … it’s in every human rights treaty. It is … other professions – lawyers, even accountants – have codes of ethics. But that’s something that diplomats don’t have, and spooks really need.
There is this James Bond idea that they’re licensed to kill, they can be licensed to do anything, and we give them a carte blanche because we think that they’re spending their time on terrorism. Quite clearly they’re not. In this case they were spending their time on tittle-tattle, and hoovering it up from the Australian Embassy in Indonesia, which was a breach of international law, a breach of the Vienna Convention, and even more interestingly, I think, a breach of the Australian law. I’ve been looking at it, as I say, and even in relation to overseas figures, they are confined to the requirements of government and the requirements of the defence force for obtaining electronic intelligence. So where were … which government required it? Mr Rudd, I think, although it started in 2007, according to the document, so there may have been some question of changeover.
But it was … who issued an authorisation requiring the tapping of the telephone of the Indonesian politicians and the Prime Minister’s wife? What happened to oversight? We set up a great oversight after the last ASIO bungle, after the Hope Commission. We set up an Inspector General of the Security Services, who’s a human rights lawyer from the University of New South Wales. What’s she doing? Let her speak out if she’s not some utter cipher, because how come she didn’t know that we were bugging the Indonesian politicians? We’ve got a Parliamentary Committee. Much good that’s been. All sorts of so-called guardians, that obviously have no impact on guardianship of the intelligence services.
I think what Mr Abbott must do is confess, because the document is obviously genuine. Here is DSD boasting. And one of the extraordinary thing is that this top-secret document gets into the hands of a 29-year-old private contractor, it’s distributed so widely. So the first thing he’s got to do is the question of incompetence – the incompetence of allowing these secrets to get out to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. But, really, what he has to do with Indonesia is admit – just as Obama did in relation to Merkel – and to promise, “We will not, now or at any time in the future, intercept your mobile telephones”. But I think he’s got to go further. It’s … he can’t continue with this nonsense, “Oh, everyone does it”.
How would we feel if Therese Rein’s phone had been tapped by the Indonesians? Look, that’s simply not good enough. There is a right to privacy, and we have violated it.
But the second thing he’s got to do is set up an enquiry: Who decided on that stupid decision to bug those telephones? Was it a Minister? Was it Mr Rudd himself? It may well have been. He was once a diplomat. What minister, or who in DSD, decided that it required … that there was a requirement that Australia bug that mobile phone? And who … I suppose the third thing is that why didn’t DSD realise that it was plainly unlawful, it was outside any rational interpretation of their statutory powers in articles 7 and 8 of the Security and Intelligence Act? And the next thing the enquiry must decide is what is to be done to hold them accountable? And how come it … the guardians of the intelligence service, set up by the Hope Report, failed so abjectly to identify this improper behaviour and to deal with it? The Inspector General of Security, the Parliamentary Committee, there’s even a Ministerial Security Adviser – all statutory positions, all guardians who have failed in their duty to ensure that Australian intelligence collects intelligence on our enemies, and not the tittle-tattle from our friends.
Or did we just do it because the Americans told us to? Well, there they are. It seems to me the important questions, as we enter this Orwellian world where state agencies can monitor everything we say. But President Obama, to his great credit, has said that Snowden has produced a debate we have to have. And that’s why he told Mrs Merkel that the United States does not now, and will not in the future, hack her mobile phone, whatever it may have done in that past. And that’s what Mr Abbott should say to the President and his wife: We were caught red-handed using the sort of tactics that journalists from Mr Murdoch’s press are on trial at the Old Bailey as we speak for doing – for hacking private telephones. And we set up the inquiry into who decided to do it, and we sack them if we find them, or we don’t re-elect them, and why our so-called guardians failed to stop it. In that way perhaps we can restore a trust that is necessary between nations who genuinely want to work to stop human rights abuses.
/continued
Something else happened in 2009 that’s come back to haunt us this week. It was a human rights atrocity in Sri Lanka. To end its war against – let us remember – a particularly vicious terrorist group, the Tamil Tigers, the Rajapaska government decided on the final solution. They removed all journalists, all NGOs from the area – from the country, actually – and they bombarded indiscriminately this 400,000-strong Tamil community, killing between … estimates vary between 40,000 and 70,000 civilians – men, women and children. The Sri Lankan navy – the beneficiary of the Australian gun boats – played the worst part – they just stood offshore, bombarding and shelling people in this vast crowd in this target area. There is ample evidence of … on the land of torture and rape, summary executions. Three hundred and fifty thousands civilians were displaced. And despite the media ban, the truth about this conflict was captured in fleeting and grainy images on hand-held cameras, showing naked female bodies on the beach, violated and drowned and shelled by the navy, lines of captives being beaten over the head with rifle butts and then shot where they crouched in handcuffs.
The UN sent a panel of experts, headed by the former Indonesian Attorney-General. Of course, they weren’t allowed to enter the country. But they interviewed survivors outside it, and formed an accurate picture of the war crimes committed by both sides. And the UN enquiry said the conduct of the war by the Sri Lankan army – I quote – “represented a grave assault on the entire regime of international law, designed to protect individual dignity during both war and peace”. It accused the government, and it accused the navy, of indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas and camps, abducting members of the local media, starving civilians in the conflict zone of food and medical supplies, as well as torturing captured Tamil soldiers, and raping civilian women. It had harsh words for the Tigers, too, of holding their own civilians hostage.
After a report as condemnatory as this, the Security Council had a duty to follow up. China threatened to veto any serious action, like referring the Sri Lankan government to the International Criminal Court. China often does that. But the Human Rights Commission put international pressure, led, I have to say, by Hillary Clinton, and the Rajapaska government pretended to set up a commission, a lessons learned and reconciliation commission, which was a sham – it was packed by government officials who were interested only in producing a report that supported the government’s propaganda. They admitted, yes, the mass rape, the mass torture, but they … that was done only by rouge elements in the military. They were out to whitewash the military.
So Sri Lanka claims that the human rights situation has improved markedly. That’s a lie. Two Human Rights Committee resolutions on the country’s human rights and the lack of accountability have been met with silence. This August, the UN Commissioner, Navi Pillay, reported that Sir Lanka curtailed or denied personal freedoms and human rights, that the country’s leaders still acted with impunity in the absence of the rule of law. And she describes an environment of increased militarisation, enforced disappearances, violence against women and religious minorities, silencing of opposition voices, and increasingly fearful press. And in the lead up this year to the Commonwealth Conference, the government destroyed the independence of the judiciary. It had a very capable, a very conservative and honest Chief Justice, Mrs Bandaranayake.
She was a former law professor, the first woman appointed to the bench. The Rajapaskas – there are four of them – there’s the President, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Minister of Defence and the Minister of the Environment – were upset by a ruling – an entirely correct, well-argued ruling – that the bill that would give them additional control over the Tamil province was unconstitutional. So what did they do? They impeached her. They set up a … the elder brother, who is the Speaker, set up a parliamentary committee of seven government ministers to try her on utterly baseless charges of coming to a wrong decision. And they convicted her, of course, and 117 of their tame MPs voted to ask the President, Mr Rajapaska, to sack her, which of course he did, replacing her with the Attorney-General, who had been so active in defending the government’s human rights violations.
The Rajapaskas then went up to the balcony of Parliament House, overlooking the river, to watch a fireworks display – a special fireworks display put on patrol boats from the Sri Lankan navy, the recipient … they’ll have two more patrol boats to shoot their fireworks from.
The judiciary has been cowed, and the legal profession is in despair. I wrote a report for the English Bar Council – it’s on the Internet if anyone wants to read it – concluding that the conduct of the government breached the independence of the judiciary, the Latimer House guidelines, one of the Commonwealth’s most basic principles. The International Court of Justice appointed a distinguished enquiry which came to exactly the same view, that the government was acting unlawfully and anti-democratically.
The Commonwealth Secretariat commissioned two leading jurists – one from England, one from South Africa – that came to the same conclusion. Disgracefully, the Secretary, Kamalesh Sharma, who’s been a disaster, refused to release it, lest it spoil the Commonwealth Conference. Well that shabby event has been and gone. Canada took the lead – how galling it is for Australian expatriates when Canada outshines them – in refusing to pay respect for a country that fails to acknowledge human rights violations. And it was followed by Mauritius. Navin Ramgoolam is a remarkable man – the most impressive Commonwealth leader at the moment in his commit to human rights. And by India.
Britain paid its usual equivocal part. When it became obvious that the Queen would be demeaned by giving any respect to Rajapaska, Buckingham Palace did a very strange thing. The Queen was travelling to Swindon, which is an hour away by rail (very good restaurants), and they announced she had gastroenteritis. Now the Palace has never acknowledged before that the Royals have a bowel movement. But it was clear that this was a signal to say, “Well, she can’t cope with spicy food in Colombo”, and so she didn’t go. Charles went instead, and David Cameron, thus depriving the Rajapaskas of the great propaganda publicity boost of embracing the Queen. And David Cameron went, but he insisted on going to Jaffna, on comforting the victims of the atrocity, and talking about accountability. Accountability, he said, within four months.
Well, Australia donated its gunboats and Mr Abbott defended the government. I quote, “Sometimes in difficult circumstances difficult things happen”. Like killing 70,000 civilians. Anyway, it seemed to be a long-winded paraphrase of Donald Rumsfeld’s “stuff happens”. But genocide is not stuff. It’s not a difficult thing that happens. Nor is torture or mass rape or mass murder. These are breaches of a universal law, which must, when they happen, be universally condemned by every state that takes its international obligations seriously. And I don’t make this as a party-political point: turning a blind eye to Sri Lanka human rights breaches was just as much Bob Carr’s policy as Julie Bishop’s.
But their thinking is … this seems to be the thinking of Australian governments that this will somehow help to stop Tamil asylum seekers. Now I think this is a very foolish, and actually very ignorant, approach, for two reasons. Firstly, because the history of human rights proves that you can’t deal with leaders who are mass murders. They always lie and cheat and make promises they’ve got no intention of keeping. Of course the patrol boats will be used for the purposes of the Sri Lankan navy, whether it’s shelling civilians or having fireworks displays when the judge is sacked. Human rights violators can’t be trusted not to violate human rights again and again. A second reason is, quite simply, the only way to stop people seeking asylum is to end the persecution that makes them seek asylum and risk their life in doing so.
And that was David Cameron’s point, and it seems to elude Mr Abbott: People will always risk their life to retain their liberty. That is, after all, the message of the Jolly Swagman in the song that should be Australia’s national anthem, Banjo Patterson’s wonderful song about a homeless man who chose to take his life rather than lose his liberty. It’s the message of the second verse of our actual anthem that chokes Mr Morrison to sing: ‘For those who’ve come across the sea, we’ve boundless plains to share’. Well, that’s hardly the message that the government is sending out today. And we cannot, in international law, turn away those who face persecution. And Australia’s only message to Sri Lanka at the Commonwealth Conference should have been, “End the persecution”.
Something else happened in 2009 that’s come back to haunt us this week. It was a human rights atrocity in Sri Lanka. To end its war against – let us remember – a particularly vicious terrorist group, the Tamil Tigers, the Rajapaska government decided on the final solution. They removed all journalists, all NGOs from the area – from the country, actually – and they bombarded indiscriminately this 400,000-strong Tamil community, killing between … estimates vary between 40,000 and 70,000 civilians – men, women and children. The Sri Lankan navy – the beneficiary of the Australian gun boats – played the worst part – they just stood offshore, bombarding and shelling people in this vast crowd in this target area. There is ample evidence of … on the land of torture and rape, summary executions. Three hundred and fifty thousands civilians were displaced. And despite the media ban, the truth about this conflict was captured in fleeting and grainy images on hand-held cameras, showing naked female bodies on the beach, violated and drowned and shelled by the navy, lines of captives being beaten over the head with rifle butts and then shot where they crouched in handcuffs.
The UN sent a panel of experts, headed by the former Indonesian Attorney-General. Of course, they weren’t allowed to enter the country. But they interviewed survivors outside it, and formed an accurate picture of the war crimes committed by both sides. And the UN enquiry said the conduct of the war by the Sri Lankan army – I quote – “represented a grave assault on the entire regime of international law, designed to protect individual dignity during both war and peace”. It accused the government, and it accused the navy, of indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas and camps, abducting members of the local media, starving civilians in the conflict zone of food and medical supplies, as well as torturing captured Tamil soldiers, and raping civilian women. It had harsh words for the Tigers, too, of holding their own civilians hostage.
After a report as condemnatory as this, the Security Council had a duty to follow up. China threatened to veto any serious action, like referring the Sri Lankan government to the International Criminal Court. China often does that. But the Human Rights Commission put international pressure, led, I have to say, by Hillary Clinton, and the Rajapaska government pretended to set up a commission, a lessons learned and reconciliation commission, which was a sham – it was packed by government officials who were interested only in producing a report that supported the government’s propaganda. They admitted, yes, the mass rape, the mass torture, but they … that was done only by rouge elements in the military. They were out to whitewash the military.
So Sri Lanka claims that the human rights situation has improved markedly. That’s a lie. Two Human Rights Committee resolutions on the country’s human rights and the lack of accountability have been met with silence. This August, the UN Commissioner, Navi Pillay, reported that Sir Lanka curtailed or denied personal freedoms and human rights, that the country’s leaders still acted with impunity in the absence of the rule of law. And she describes an environment of increased militarisation, enforced disappearances, violence against women and religious minorities, silencing of opposition voices, and increasingly fearful press. And in the lead up this year to the Commonwealth Conference, the government destroyed the independence of the judiciary. It had a very capable, a very conservative and honest Chief Justice, Mrs Bandaranayake.
She was a former law professor, the first woman appointed to the bench. The Rajapaskas – there are four of them – there’s the President, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Minister of Defence and the Minister of the Environment – were upset by a ruling – an entirely correct, well-argued ruling – that the bill that would give them additional control over the Tamil province was unconstitutional. So what did they do? They impeached her. They set up a … the elder brother, who is the Speaker, set up a parliamentary committee of seven government ministers to try her on utterly baseless charges of coming to a wrong decision. And they convicted her, of course, and 117 of their tame MPs voted to ask the President, Mr Rajapaska, to sack her, which of course he did, replacing her with the Attorney-General, who had been so active in defending the government’s human rights violations.
The Rajapaskas then went up to the balcony of Parliament House, overlooking the river, to watch a fireworks display – a special fireworks display put on patrol boats from the Sri Lankan navy, the recipient … they’ll have two more patrol boats to shoot their fireworks from.
The judiciary has been cowed, and the legal profession is in despair. I wrote a report for the English Bar Council – it’s on the Internet if anyone wants to read it – concluding that the conduct of the government breached the independence of the judiciary, the Latimer House guidelines, one of the Commonwealth’s most basic principles. The International Court of Justice appointed a distinguished enquiry which came to exactly the same view, that the government was acting unlawfully and anti-democratically.
The Commonwealth Secretariat commissioned two leading jurists – one from England, one from South Africa – that came to the same conclusion. Disgracefully, the Secretary, Kamalesh Sharma, who’s been a disaster, refused to release it, lest it spoil the Commonwealth Conference. Well that shabby event has been and gone. Canada took the lead – how galling it is for Australian expatriates when Canada outshines them – in refusing to pay respect for a country that fails to acknowledge human rights violations. And it was followed by Mauritius. Navin Ramgoolam is a remarkable man – the most impressive Commonwealth leader at the moment in his commit to human rights. And by India.
Britain paid its usual equivocal part. When it became obvious that the Queen would be demeaned by giving any respect to Rajapaska, Buckingham Palace did a very strange thing. The Queen was travelling to Swindon, which is an hour away by rail (very good restaurants), and they announced she had gastroenteritis. Now the Palace has never acknowledged before that the Royals have a bowel movement. But it was clear that this was a signal to say, “Well, she can’t cope with spicy food in Colombo”, and so she didn’t go. Charles went instead, and David Cameron, thus depriving the Rajapaskas of the great propaganda publicity boost of embracing the Queen. And David Cameron went, but he insisted on going to Jaffna, on comforting the victims of the atrocity, and talking about accountability. Accountability, he said, within four months.
Well, Australia donated its gunboats and Mr Abbott defended the government. I quote, “Sometimes in difficult circumstances difficult things happen”. Like killing 70,000 civilians. Anyway, it seemed to be a long-winded paraphrase of Donald Rumsfeld’s “stuff happens”. But genocide is not stuff. It’s not a difficult thing that happens. Nor is torture or mass rape or mass murder. These are breaches of a universal law, which must, when they happen, be universally condemned by every state that takes its international obligations seriously. And I don’t make this as a party-political point: turning a blind eye to Sri Lanka human rights breaches was just as much Bob Carr’s policy as Julie Bishop’s.
But their thinking is … this seems to be the thinking of Australian governments that this will somehow help to stop Tamil asylum seekers. Now I think this is a very foolish, and actually very ignorant, approach, for two reasons. Firstly, because the history of human rights proves that you can’t deal with leaders who are mass murders. They always lie and cheat and make promises they’ve got no intention of keeping. Of course the patrol boats will be used for the purposes of the Sri Lankan navy, whether it’s shelling civilians or having fireworks displays when the judge is sacked. Human rights violators can’t be trusted not to violate human rights again and again. A second reason is, quite simply, the only way to stop people seeking asylum is to end the persecution that makes them seek asylum and risk their life in doing so.
And that was David Cameron’s point, and it seems to elude Mr Abbott: People will always risk their life to retain their liberty. That is, after all, the message of the Jolly Swagman in the song that should be Australia’s national anthem, Banjo Patterson’s wonderful song about a homeless man who chose to take his life rather than lose his liberty. It’s the message of the second verse of our actual anthem that chokes Mr Morrison to sing: ‘For those who’ve come across the sea, we’ve boundless plains to share’. Well, that’s hardly the message that the government is sending out today. And we cannot, in international law, turn away those who face persecution. And Australia’s only message to Sri Lanka at the Commonwealth Conference should have been, “End the persecution”.
/continued
Well, I’ve spoken about some of the contemporary challenges for human rights now that the treaties are in place and the courts are up and running. But there are problems. You can’t try everyone. Most human rights violators act because they don’t fear retribution. They’re not political and military leaders; they’re merely what one might term “the train drivers to Auschwitz” – the judges, the policemen, soldiers, public servants, utterly necessary to the commission of crimes against humanity, but not important enough for the international community to put then on trial. But lives might be saved if they decided not to act, or decided to act differently.
And over the past year or so we’ve come up with a way to deter some of these willing tools of oppressive governments, who make money from their abominable acts and store it in countries where they can take advantage of the banking system and the school system, and even the hospital system. This is called a Magnitsky law. And, really, every civilised government should have one. And it’s becoming a campaign objective. The US has taken the lead. Many European countries are planning to do the same. And Australian could and should move in the same direction.
But let me tell you a bit about Sergei Magnitsky, the courageous accountant …who … and how … why … how he died and why his name has been given to this new development in human rights law. Sergei was a tax accountant. He acted for an American client called Bill Browder, who was, oddly enough, the grandson of Earl Browder, the great ‘30s communist leader. And despite this heritage, Bill went to Harvard Business School and went to Russia as a hedge fund trader, which he did very well. His tax accountant in Moscow was Sergei Magnitsky, and he discovered an incredible identity theft – fraud – that Bill’s companies had been used without his knowledge by a syndicate of crooked police and tax officials, who used them to steal $250M of public money.
And when he reported this massive fraud, they gave to investigate it the very police who’d pulled it off. They arrested him, kept him in prison for a year without trial, thanks to lick-spittle judges who ignored the law and ignored his failing health. And he was finally beaten to death in prison by the criminals in the state who had committed the crime that he had informed on. Well, was this just another outrage in Putin’s Russia? The human rights groups in Russia said so, but they didn’t get anywhere.
And that’s when Bill Browder came in with a massive campaign in the West to identify and condemn the 30 or 40 people responsible for … morally and legally for Sergei’s death – the police, the tax officials, who were now busily laundering their money through Cyprus and London, and the supine judges who had cruelly denied him bail. He named them and shamed them in a massive campaign, agitated for them to be barred from the casinos of London and Paris, which were their favourite haunts. Well, one policeman, on a salary of $300 a month, paid $2M to English lawyers to sue Bill for libel. And I had the privilege of defending him, and we got the case thrown out a couple of months ago. But that’s the extreme to which the Russian state went.
But Bill took the campaign to the United States, and it succeeded. The Magnitsky law was passed. President Obama signed it. Twenty policemen, tax officials and judges were identified. Their funds in US banks were frozen, and they were barred from entry. Of course Putin reacted with puerile fury – he stopped the adoption of Russian orphans by US families, which was disgraceful. And then, more sensibly, he introduced his own Magnitsky law, targeting American officials who ran Guantanamo Bay. That was more appropriate, although I doubt that many of them would want to visit Russia.
But the American legislation is what I call ‘Magnitsky Lite’ – it only targets the specific 20 individual involved in Sergei’s ill treatment. And in Europe there’s … we’re trying to enact a broader law that would prohibit foreign human rights violators from entering, and would freeze any bank accounts they might have. An effective law would also place duties on banks to disclose the accounts of such people, and enable the state to confiscate the money in them. Magnitsky law and international law can’t cover heads of state, ministers, diplomats, and those who hold legal immunities. It can cover those who carry out their orders, who profit from crimes against humanity sufficiently to stash their ill-gotten gains in more stable countries.
And the more countries that enact a Magnitsky law, the more effective it becomes as a deterrent against human rights abuse. And when there’s no place to do business – no place to send your children to good schools – then the train drivers to Auschwitz might think a little differently about obeying the orders to drive the trains. In such cases a law that denied their children entry to take the place the corrupt parent has reserved for them at Geelong Grammar and the like would have a real deterrent effect. I mean normally sanctions try to avoid any impact on children, but in my experience human rights violators who profit from the violation are very often motivated by a desire to benefit their own children, and I think corrupt benefits should be stripped from their families in these circumstances, denying the family, including their grandparents, the right to enter for medical treatment, denying them a holiday on the Gold Coast, would work as a deterrent.
Well, I’ve spoken about some of the contemporary challenges for human rights now that the treaties are in place and the courts are up and running. But there are problems. You can’t try everyone. Most human rights violators act because they don’t fear retribution. They’re not political and military leaders; they’re merely what one might term “the train drivers to Auschwitz” – the judges, the policemen, soldiers, public servants, utterly necessary to the commission of crimes against humanity, but not important enough for the international community to put then on trial. But lives might be saved if they decided not to act, or decided to act differently.
And over the past year or so we’ve come up with a way to deter some of these willing tools of oppressive governments, who make money from their abominable acts and store it in countries where they can take advantage of the banking system and the school system, and even the hospital system. This is called a Magnitsky law. And, really, every civilised government should have one. And it’s becoming a campaign objective. The US has taken the lead. Many European countries are planning to do the same. And Australian could and should move in the same direction.
But let me tell you a bit about Sergei Magnitsky, the courageous accountant …who … and how … why … how he died and why his name has been given to this new development in human rights law. Sergei was a tax accountant. He acted for an American client called Bill Browder, who was, oddly enough, the grandson of Earl Browder, the great ‘30s communist leader. And despite this heritage, Bill went to Harvard Business School and went to Russia as a hedge fund trader, which he did very well. His tax accountant in Moscow was Sergei Magnitsky, and he discovered an incredible identity theft – fraud – that Bill’s companies had been used without his knowledge by a syndicate of crooked police and tax officials, who used them to steal $250M of public money.
And when he reported this massive fraud, they gave to investigate it the very police who’d pulled it off. They arrested him, kept him in prison for a year without trial, thanks to lick-spittle judges who ignored the law and ignored his failing health. And he was finally beaten to death in prison by the criminals in the state who had committed the crime that he had informed on. Well, was this just another outrage in Putin’s Russia? The human rights groups in Russia said so, but they didn’t get anywhere.
And that’s when Bill Browder came in with a massive campaign in the West to identify and condemn the 30 or 40 people responsible for … morally and legally for Sergei’s death – the police, the tax officials, who were now busily laundering their money through Cyprus and London, and the supine judges who had cruelly denied him bail. He named them and shamed them in a massive campaign, agitated for them to be barred from the casinos of London and Paris, which were their favourite haunts. Well, one policeman, on a salary of $300 a month, paid $2M to English lawyers to sue Bill for libel. And I had the privilege of defending him, and we got the case thrown out a couple of months ago. But that’s the extreme to which the Russian state went.
But Bill took the campaign to the United States, and it succeeded. The Magnitsky law was passed. President Obama signed it. Twenty policemen, tax officials and judges were identified. Their funds in US banks were frozen, and they were barred from entry. Of course Putin reacted with puerile fury – he stopped the adoption of Russian orphans by US families, which was disgraceful. And then, more sensibly, he introduced his own Magnitsky law, targeting American officials who ran Guantanamo Bay. That was more appropriate, although I doubt that many of them would want to visit Russia.
But the American legislation is what I call ‘Magnitsky Lite’ – it only targets the specific 20 individual involved in Sergei’s ill treatment. And in Europe there’s … we’re trying to enact a broader law that would prohibit foreign human rights violators from entering, and would freeze any bank accounts they might have. An effective law would also place duties on banks to disclose the accounts of such people, and enable the state to confiscate the money in them. Magnitsky law and international law can’t cover heads of state, ministers, diplomats, and those who hold legal immunities. It can cover those who carry out their orders, who profit from crimes against humanity sufficiently to stash their ill-gotten gains in more stable countries.
And the more countries that enact a Magnitsky law, the more effective it becomes as a deterrent against human rights abuse. And when there’s no place to do business – no place to send your children to good schools – then the train drivers to Auschwitz might think a little differently about obeying the orders to drive the trains. In such cases a law that denied their children entry to take the place the corrupt parent has reserved for them at Geelong Grammar and the like would have a real deterrent effect. I mean normally sanctions try to avoid any impact on children, but in my experience human rights violators who profit from the violation are very often motivated by a desire to benefit their own children, and I think corrupt benefits should be stripped from their families in these circumstances, denying the family, including their grandparents, the right to enter for medical treatment, denying them a holiday on the Gold Coast, would work as a deterrent.
/continued
So I think the Magnitsky law movement is an important new tool to force powerful people and government servants, particularly, in other countries to recognise that violating human rights is again not worth the candle. The stigma on being on the Magnitsky list, of course, ruffles feathers … as Putin’s reaction showed. And there has to be a fair and independent process to identify the targets for an impartial tribunal to find that their human rights culpability has been proved. A process designed to deter unfair behaviour by officials must itself be fair.
And this fundamental principle has not been recognised as yet by the United States, because the targets are designated by the State Department and have no way of challenging their designation. We have to have a quasi-judicial determination of the candidates for a Magnitsky law treatment.
Why should Australia have a Magnitsky law? We have, at best, a patchy history of letting war criminals in to our shores. The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre, in 2007, in its annual status report, said that Australia was – I quote – “the only major Western country of refuge”. And we are, after all, a financial hub in the Asia Pacific region, envied for our education and health institutions. We should not make these available to war criminals, to officials who carry out their orders, to the 117 MPs who voted to deny the independence of the judiciary in Sri Lanka. We should become part of a global movement that says, “Their business is not welcome here”. When these men face the prospect of international criminal justice, then no one accepts their ill-gotten gains. When these men and women are guilty, but not so gravely as would have them picked up by international courts, then they’ve got to be made to think, where the only place they can send their children to school, or their parents to hospital, are the very local places where their corruption has emaciated, then the world will become a lonelier place for them.
There is some talk already in Canberra, I’m pleased to say, very much at the instigation of the G20, to have a Magnitsky law to tackle international money launderers. But we should first think in terms of devising one that will identify and exclude those who aid and abet human rights abuses. It is ironical, after all, that our refugee policy is so obsessed with targeting the victims of human rights abuses – those who’ve been persecuted. The people we should be keeping out of Australia are those who aid and abet the abusers. And we should keep their money and their families out as well. For them, we have no boundless plains to share.
Well that is all I want to say about the developments in international human rights, and the part that Australia can play to honour the visions of those great Australians, too often forgotten, who played such an important part in forging the Declaration of Human Rights – Colonel Hodgson and Alan Watt, Jessie Street and Doc Evatt and others. When Eleanor Roosevelt handed this Magna Carta to mankind to the Doc on the 10th of December 1948, she reminded him that human rights begin at home, in small and obscure places. “Like the ACT and Victoria?” he asked. Well he didn’t really; I made that up. But I would like, in closing, to salute this state and its present government, including Geoff Shaw, for having the foresight to stick with your human rights charter. It has worked to provide greater access to justice, greater fairness to those who would otherwise fall through the cracks, and its constitutionality has been upheld by the High Court. And it is of increasing interest to overseas countries, which of course have a human rights act in place. Your jurisprudence … Victorian jurisprudence is starting to make its mark on the world, a world which now cannot ignore Australian jurisprudence, which comes from the High Court.
So … and congratulations, too, on that Parliamentary Committee last week, which did produce a ground-breaking report, to tackle what I believe is one of the worst violations of the human rights of children, those literally soul-destroying acts of clerical sexual abuse.
How far you’ve come, from the death-sentencing days of Henry Bolte and the literary chastity belt imposed by Arthur Rylah. But we’ll never get human rights exactly right. They’re often in conflict. Between free speech and fair press, for example, between bikies and Campbell Newman.
But that’s the great thing about them – they challenge us to think and to argue and to work out our own human and social progress according to the universal values that are embodied in the Universal Declaration.
Australia was there in full force when it was conceived. Our challenge today is to ensure that Australia will still be there. Thank you.
End of Oration.
So I think the Magnitsky law movement is an important new tool to force powerful people and government servants, particularly, in other countries to recognise that violating human rights is again not worth the candle. The stigma on being on the Magnitsky list, of course, ruffles feathers … as Putin’s reaction showed. And there has to be a fair and independent process to identify the targets for an impartial tribunal to find that their human rights culpability has been proved. A process designed to deter unfair behaviour by officials must itself be fair.
And this fundamental principle has not been recognised as yet by the United States, because the targets are designated by the State Department and have no way of challenging their designation. We have to have a quasi-judicial determination of the candidates for a Magnitsky law treatment.
Why should Australia have a Magnitsky law? We have, at best, a patchy history of letting war criminals in to our shores. The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre, in 2007, in its annual status report, said that Australia was – I quote – “the only major Western country of refuge”. And we are, after all, a financial hub in the Asia Pacific region, envied for our education and health institutions. We should not make these available to war criminals, to officials who carry out their orders, to the 117 MPs who voted to deny the independence of the judiciary in Sri Lanka. We should become part of a global movement that says, “Their business is not welcome here”. When these men face the prospect of international criminal justice, then no one accepts their ill-gotten gains. When these men and women are guilty, but not so gravely as would have them picked up by international courts, then they’ve got to be made to think, where the only place they can send their children to school, or their parents to hospital, are the very local places where their corruption has emaciated, then the world will become a lonelier place for them.
There is some talk already in Canberra, I’m pleased to say, very much at the instigation of the G20, to have a Magnitsky law to tackle international money launderers. But we should first think in terms of devising one that will identify and exclude those who aid and abet human rights abuses. It is ironical, after all, that our refugee policy is so obsessed with targeting the victims of human rights abuses – those who’ve been persecuted. The people we should be keeping out of Australia are those who aid and abet the abusers. And we should keep their money and their families out as well. For them, we have no boundless plains to share.
Well that is all I want to say about the developments in international human rights, and the part that Australia can play to honour the visions of those great Australians, too often forgotten, who played such an important part in forging the Declaration of Human Rights – Colonel Hodgson and Alan Watt, Jessie Street and Doc Evatt and others. When Eleanor Roosevelt handed this Magna Carta to mankind to the Doc on the 10th of December 1948, she reminded him that human rights begin at home, in small and obscure places. “Like the ACT and Victoria?” he asked. Well he didn’t really; I made that up. But I would like, in closing, to salute this state and its present government, including Geoff Shaw, for having the foresight to stick with your human rights charter. It has worked to provide greater access to justice, greater fairness to those who would otherwise fall through the cracks, and its constitutionality has been upheld by the High Court. And it is of increasing interest to overseas countries, which of course have a human rights act in place. Your jurisprudence … Victorian jurisprudence is starting to make its mark on the world, a world which now cannot ignore Australian jurisprudence, which comes from the High Court.
So … and congratulations, too, on that Parliamentary Committee last week, which did produce a ground-breaking report, to tackle what I believe is one of the worst violations of the human rights of children, those literally soul-destroying acts of clerical sexual abuse.
How far you’ve come, from the death-sentencing days of Henry Bolte and the literary chastity belt imposed by Arthur Rylah. But we’ll never get human rights exactly right. They’re often in conflict. Between free speech and fair press, for example, between bikies and Campbell Newman.
But that’s the great thing about them – they challenge us to think and to argue and to work out our own human and social progress according to the universal values that are embodied in the Universal Declaration.
Australia was there in full force when it was conceived. Our challenge today is to ensure that Australia will still be there. Thank you.
End of Oration.
Sorry, come again
Masterchef. Neil Hodgson was eating in the restaurant in Litchfield.
