Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I wish to take note of the report of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, Criminality, corruption and impunity: should Australia join the Global Magnitsky movement? The Greens welcome this report and really welcome the multipartisan support that the report has. We are very pleased, the report having been presented, to know that it's got support right across the parliament.

We believe that universal human rights are fundamental and must be respected and protected in all countries and for all people. That means we want to see greater international respect for and protection of human rights. As well as governments, we want to see non-government entities, including individuals and corporations, respecting human rights and being accountable for human rights violations. People who are responsible for human rights crimes need to face the consequences of their actions. Magnitsky legislation, as is discussed in this report, would enable us to bar human rights abusers from visiting Australia or from having financial interests in Australia, including, for example, safe haven bank accounts in which they can keep their wealth that has often been gained by corrupt means.

In talking to this report tonight I want to note that we are hopeful the government will act urgently to provide exposure drafts to develop and then provide exposure draft legislation that can implement the key recommendations from this report. I'm a member of the committee now. I wasn't during the process of this report being developed, but I have been engaged in following it through its development. From here, the Greens will be working to make sure that any Magnitsky legislation is robustly drafted and has real teeth. We need to get the detail right so that it can't be misused and, in particular, so that there is independence and objectivity in determining who is caught up under this legislation, but we need to act urgently.

We need to act urgently for two reasons. The first, of course, is that the sooner it is implemented the sooner it will, hopefully, discourage some of the more egregious attacks on human rights that are occurring globally, including extrajudicial killings, torture, arrests and disappearances of people who express dissent to authoritarian governments. Tragically, we know that these types of attacks are occurring across the globe far too often and extensively in multiple regimes across the world. Just in the last couple of weeks I have spoken in this place about human rights violations in West Papua, India, China, Hong Kong, Cambodia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Palestine, Colombia and Ethiopia and expressed concerns about due process in Samoa and Sri Lanka. The second reason we need to act urgently is that with other jurisdictions having enacted Magnitsky legislation, including the US, Canada and the UK, there is a significant concern that unless Australia acts we will become the safe haven for human rights abusers, because other countries have restricted access by these people to their shores.

In conclusion, the Greens believe that a Magnitsky act would provide a really powerful tool to address human rights abuses and that we should be urgently working to be putting such legislation in place here in Australia.