Federal Court upholds Australian Government support of torture

CANTERBURY- BANKSTOWN PEACE GROUP
MEDIA RELEASE April 26, 2009

Federal Court upholds Australian Government support of torture

The Federal Court has dismissed Mamdouh Habib's appeal against the decision of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) decision not to return his passport.

The former Howard Government withdrew Habib's passport after his release from Guantanamo Bay. The reason given was that he might commit some illegal act if allowed to leave the country. The basis of this assertion was "secret" because of "national security" issues.

In a very controversial case, the AAT supported the Government position.

"Never mind that more than 80% of evidence was not presented in open court," Raul Bassi from the Canterbury Bankstown Peace Group commented. "Habib and his lawyer received hundred of documents mostly blacked out for national security reasons."

"The most dreadful part of the Tribunal ruling was that even the presiding magistrate accepted that Mamdouh was tortured. Yet whatever he said under torture was accepted by the Tribunal as evidence against him. On this basis the AAT denied Mahdouh his passport."

Bassi continued: "With the election of the Rudd Government, Habib was hopeful that the approach to his case would change. But in relation to human rights, as with Aboriginal issues, the war in Afghanistan and the anti-terrorist laws, there is a line of continuity between the old and new governments.

"Yesterday's ruling confirms that. The same lawyer who represented the Howard government in the first case represented the Rudd government in the appeal, and with the same arguments.

Bassi added that there was no doubt about the existence of torture by the military and security agencies of the United States and its allies. "The Obama administration has accepted that the US has been using torture as a common procedure supported by the highest authorities in the country at the time. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Federal Police originally denied any knowledge, but lately its has come to light that their agents saw Mamdouh Habib in Guantanamo Bay clearly in distress and that he told them that he had been tortured."

"The question now is what Mamdouh can do to achieve justice. All judicial avenues seem closed and appeals to the government have fall on deaf ears,. The Canterbury-Bankstown Peace Group wrote to the Attorney-General last year asking for an inquiry but he refused to do anything about the case."

Bassi concluded: "The Canterbury-Bankstow n Peace Group is committed to supporting its member, Mamdouh Habib in his quest for justice. We are organising different actions to take his case to Canberra, into the international arena, and to let everyone know what the Australian government is capable of.

We initiated the campaign to bring Mamdouh and David Hicks back from Guantanamo Bay. We could never have guessed that he was coming back to a country where his rights would be almost as restricted as when he was in prison."

For more information: Raul Bassi 0403037376

Howard's gone: Now what?

OUR COMMON CAUSE

Howard's Gone: Now What?

Dick Nichols

From Green Left Weekly, 7 December 2007


“Now what?” must be the most commonly asked question among the left these days. Now what for the struggle for Indigenous rights? For the struggle against global warming? For the anti-war movement? For the fight against the Tamar Valley pulp mill? For the Your Rights at Work committees? Local Socialist Alliance branches have already begun a series of forums on this theme.

There isn’t a simple answer out there, just waiting to be unwrapped, microwaved and consumed by a grateful movement. Rather, the answer to “Now what?” will only come from trial and error, and from honest judging of the results of many experiments. Here all attempts to honestly confront “Now what?” are welcome, from GetUp’s two-day Sydney Refresh forum to Friends of the Earth’s Melbourne seminar on alternatives to establishment recipes for countering global warming.

This is an inevitable phase. That’s partly because of the unprecedented way the Rudd government came it power. It inherited government more because John Howard was rejected than because of its own program, with its powerful elements of continuity with the Coalition.

As a result, the federal Labor government begins its rule faced with a whole lot of scepticism, cynicism and doubt among those very people whose 10 years of campaigns against Howard’s crimes made the ALP’s victory possible.

Of course, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard know this. That means that we should not be surprised by a shower of progressive gestures aimed at winning our support. Last week’s cabinet decision to have a judicial inquiry into the case of Dr Mahomed Haneef is a case in point.

Our response should be to demand that such a gesture be converted into an independent investigation of all attacks on people’s democratic rights made under the “anti-terrorism” legislation. Yes, clear Haneef’s name and nail the guilty parties, but let’s also have an independent inquiry into ASIO’s role in the treatment of Mamdouh Habib and into the Howard government’s deal with the US over David Hicks, which made silence the price of his return to Australia.

So now what? For the Socialist Alliance the main point is to keep the movements for peace, workers’ rights, civil liberties and environmental sustainability as independent of the Rudd government and the Labor Party as possible. We shouldn’t forget the sad fate of the movements that brought down Malcolm Fraser in 1983 — they were split, bought off, neutralised into pure lobbying outfits and, if they wouldn’t fit in with the Australian Council of Trade Unions-ALP Accord, vilified and marginalised.

This time round it must be different. From refugees’ rights to global warming, the movements have campaigned for demands that the Rudd government, for all the gestures it may attempt, is light years from implementing. The best chance of forcing it to do a bit more than it has actually planned or wants to do is to maintain the movements’ real strength, their capacity to increase the political price for Rudd of a refusal to listen.

A very good starting point would be to force Labor to reverse its endorsement of Gunns’ poisonous Tamar Valley pulp mill. The movements, especially the wonderful, many-sided campaign against Work Choices, ended the miserable and unlamented rule of the lying rodent and created heartfelt celebration across the land.

The Socialist Alliance will be doing everything in its power to help the movements build on that great victory. In that way we shall be trying to change not just a government, but Australian society itself.

[Dick Nichols is the national coordinator of the Socialist Alliance (written in a personal capacity).]