Is the Coalition government surreptitiously trying to reimpose the death penalty on Australian citizens? This question has been posed by the conduct of the Australian Federal Police in the case of nine Australians arrested in Bali on April 17 by Indonesian police with the cooperation of the AFP. The Bali nine have been charged with attempting to smuggle 8.65 kilograms of heroin out of Bali to Australia. If found guilty, they will face death by firing squad.
Australia abolished the death penalty in 1973 and has had a longstanding policy of only cooperating with law enforcement agencies in countries that have the death penalty if those countries agree not to seek its application in any resulting prosecutions.
As federal Labor backbencher Duncan Kerr observed in an interview with ABC TV's Lateline program on April 26, if "Singapore approaches us for assistance which requires us to produce, say, forensic evidence or something of that kind or requests extradition, we would say to the Singaporese [sic] government 'no' because of our legislation. 'Unless you give an undertaking that the death penalty will not be imposed, we can't extend that cooperation'."
However, in the case of the Bali nine, the AFP cooperated with Indonesian police without seeking any such undertaking. Furthermore, the AFP and its political masters in the federal Coalition government clearly decided that having a group of Australian "heroin mules" face the death penalty in Indonesia was more important than tracking them back to Australia — where they might lead the AFP to their distributors and their wealthy financial operators.
Civil liberties campaigner Terry O'Gorman noted that the AFP's decision not to do this was a departure from its usual procedures. "It's commonplace for the AFP and Australian Crime Commission to follow Australian citizens across many continents on a suspicion they are about to import drugs into Australia and then arrest them the moment they arrive in the country", O'Gorman told the April 21 Australian, adding: "If the AFP tipped off the Indonesian police that these people were allegedly carrying heroin, then we have seen a remarkable change in policy."
The federal government, while formally maintaining previous Labor and Coalition governments' opposition to the death penalty being applied to any Australian citizens, has previously authorised cooperation by the AFP with US government agencies to try to put two Australian citizens accused of being "terrorists" — David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib — on trial by US military tribunals, trials that could also have resulted in the imposition of the death penalty.
It was only as a result of a public outcry at the evidently unfair nature of these US military tribunals that Prime Minister John Howard's government was forced to extract an agreement from the US government — Canberra's "coalition of the killing" partner — to not seek the death penalty in any trial of Hicks and Habib.
It is not hard to whip up public condemnation of alleged drug dealers (although those making a real killing out of the drug industry are rarely prosecuted), and it appears that Howard is using this situation to build public support for his anti-life agenda.
From Green Left Weekly, May 4, 2005.
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