Cameron Thompson (Blair, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Calwell for moving the motion in the House about David Hicks, but I want to disagree directly with some of the contents of the motion, some of the assertions the member for Calwell has made and some of the findings that she has been quite happy to cobble together in support of her case. Primarily, it seems to me that the opposition’s case on Mr Hicks relies on a series of misrepresentations of different parts of law, either in relation to the Geneva convention on prisoners of war or in relation to the way Australian criminal law might apply to Mr Hicks. In either case, the opposition is taking a little of one and a little of another and mixing them together in a way they are not meant to be mixed at all.

The result of that is that inferences are made about Mr Hicks that I think even the Leader of the Opposition has some difficulty with. While the Leader of the Opposition has said in the past that he wants to get David Hicks home, I think all Australians firstly want to see Mr Hicks charged and tried in a manner that can put to bed the allegations that have been made against him. The allegations are severe and very serious. There is no way that the charges against him of attempted murder in violation of the law of war and of providing material support for terrorism should be allowed not to be heard. There is no way that they should be neglected or pushed to one side because of a confection of assertions about two disparate bodies of law—laws for prisoners of war and the Australian Criminal Code—such as has been presented by the member opposite.

Mr Hicks’s representatives have not contested that he has had an association with the Kosovo Liberation Army, Lashkar-e-Taiba, al-Qaeda and the Taliban. There is a very strong body of evidence that is basically agreed to on both sides about Mr Hicks’s activities during the period that covers the charges against him. As I said before, the question that arises is: is Mr Hicks to be subject to the Geneva convention—that is, as a prisoner of war—because he was with those organisations, or is he to be treated as someone who was engaged in criminal activity? The fundamental problem in this case, which has huge ramifications for the body of legal thought across the world, is that he falls into a grey area in between.

The law that applies to mercenaries in article 47 of the Geneva convention—you have to ask if David Hicks was endeavouring to be a mercenary associated with these organisations—states that a mercenary is a person who is specially recruited to be part of an armed conflict and that they take direct part in the hostilities, but it assumes that they are part of a party to the conflict, part of an army of a state, and are brought in to work as mercenaries with the army of that state. The Geneva convention deals with the armies of states, and obviously, when talking about Lashkar-e-Taiba or al-Qaeda, that definition gets very difficult. The assertion by the opposition that you could apply Australian law has been challenged by a range of people, most notably the Australian Director of Public Prosecutions, Damian Bugg, who has been quoted as saying at estimates that there is no way that Australian law can be applied to Mr Hicks. Also, in an article on the ABC, Gillian Triggs, director of the institute for comparative and international law, has said there would be difficulty applying Australian law to David Hicks. Members of the opposition who want to bring Mr Hicks back for trial are off the track. (Time expired)

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