In 2004 operatives of the Australian Security Intelligence Service planted listening devices in the Timor Leste cabinet room. The aim of the eavesdropping was to maximise Australia’s position at the negotiations over boundaries in the Timor Sea and who got the lion’s share of the loot from the oil and gas resources.
Whistle-blowers, Witness K, and Canberra lawyer Bernard Collaery, are charged with breaches variously of the criminal code and the Intelligence Services Act – conspiracy to communicate Asis information – and, in Collaery’s case, also communicating Asis information to journalists at the ABC. No, it is not the real wrongdoers, defying international law to spy on a friendly and impoverished neighbour for commercial advantage, who is in the dock, but those who exposed it.
There has been mounting public condemnation of the Commonwealth’s insistence that these prosecutions are of such great importance to national security that the court should be closed and the hearing conducted in secret. In all, there have been 30 or so scheduled hearings since the charges were laid, most of them conducted in secret.
Australian justice is shrouded in secrecy, Stalin-style, where citizens can be secretly jailed and where reasons for findings of guilt or otherwise cannot be published, and as in the case of Witness J.
Whistle-blowers, Witness K, and Canberra lawyer Bernard Collaery, are charged with breaches variously of the criminal code and the Intelligence Services Act – conspiracy to communicate Asis information – and, in Collaery’s case, also communicating Asis information to journalists at the ABC. No, it is not the real wrongdoers, defying international law to spy on a friendly and impoverished neighbour for commercial advantage, who is in the dock, but those who exposed it.
There has been mounting public condemnation of the Commonwealth’s insistence that these prosecutions are of such great importance to national security that the court should be closed and the hearing conducted in secret. In all, there have been 30 or so scheduled hearings since the charges were laid, most of them conducted in secret.
Australian justice is shrouded in secrecy, Stalin-style, where citizens can be secretly jailed and where reasons for findings of guilt or otherwise cannot be published, and as in the case of Witness J.
Witness K was due to give confidential evidence in proceedings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the Hague where Timor Leste was seeking to set aside the treaty arrangements which it now knew to be tainted by Australia’s bugging and eavesdropping. Shortly before he was expected to travel overseas for this purpose, his home was raided and his passport confiscated, and it remains confiscated. In normal court proceedings, it would be a contempt of court or a prejudice to the administration of justice if a witness is prevented from giving evidence. Here is a case where "national security" is being played as a card cover-up the wrongdoing of a previous Coalition government. Likewise, Bernard Collaery’s office was raided in December 2013, the security services took his brief relating to Timor Leste’s arbitration proceedings.
The ICJ made binding orders to ensure that Australia did not use the material to disadvantage Timor Leste. Of the 16 judges on the ICJ panel there was only one exception. The dissenting voice was Australian and Conservative, Ian Callinan.
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