Senate debates

Monday, 9 August 2021

Committees

Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade; Government Response to Report

5:38 pm

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

[by video link] After eight months and two Senate orders, it's great to finally see a response from the government to the report of the Joint Standing Committee of Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, Criminality, corruption and impunity: should Australia join the Global Magnitsky movement? I note this is only a response to the report. After eight months, we are still yet to see actual legislation that would implement the recommendations that are outlined in this response. We will of course be scrutinising that legislation very closely once we have it and will respond in more detail then.

I want to highlight a few of the initial concerns that have been raised by human rights groups in relation to the government's response and what we know about it so far. Rawan Arraf, from the Australian Centre for International Justice, has raised concerns about the government's decision to amend the existing Autonomous Sanctions Act rather than introducing standalone Magnitsky legislation. She said:

The government has a real opportunity to introduce a stand-alone, targeted, human-rights sanctions act. However, it wants to amend the clunky Autonomous Sanctions Act, which even the parliamentary committee agreed was ineffective.

Save the Children said it was 'a step in the right direction but falls short', and, similarly, Human Rights Watch said there are further steps Australia can take to strengthen this proposal. From our initial reading, we think that there are some areas where the government should be going further, echoing those concerns from the human rights groups and, in fact, responding and supporting the recommendations that our cross-party unanimous consensus report put to government. Given that the committee report explicitly recommended standalone targeted sanctions legislation to address human rights violations and corruptions, it's concerning to see a proposal to amend the existing framework. There was a lot of evidence that was presented to the committee that resulted in that recommendation—that we needed a standalone targeted sanctions legislation framework.

Similarly, I am very concerned that the government response is rejecting recommendations 12 to 14 of the committee report for an independent body to oversee recommendations as to who is sanctioned. I'll go through those recommendations. Recommendation 12: the committee recommended that an independent advisory body be constituted to receive nominations for sanctions targets, consider them and make recommendations to the decision-maker. Recommendation 13 recommended that the structure of the independent advisory body should be set out in regulations and should include the ability to conduct its inquiry in public, which is incredibly important for transparency of a sanctions regime. Recommendation 14 recommended that the new legislation should require the decision-maker to consider recommendations by the advisory body and give reasons for any decision not to adopt a recommendation by the advisory body. In rejecting these recommendations, it doesn't move us very much further along than where we are currently with the existing autonomous sanctions regimes.

I want to move to the case of Myanmar. We have an autonomous sanctions regime that applies to Myanmar, but we've got the government refusing to apply targeted sanctions to Myanmar and we have no transparency about why that is the case, despite the fact that the UK, the US, Canada and the European Union all imposed targeted sanctions on the leaders of the military coup in Myanmar at the beginning of this year. We have a foreign minister who is basically saying it's not in Australia's national interest, without giving us any reasoning as to why that's the case. Having in place the sort of sanctions regime that is outlined in our report would open this up and create transparency for everyone, enabling them to see the recommendations of experts and know who they consider should be sanctioned. Of course, at the end of the day, it's up to the foreign minister and the government to decide who to sanction, but this would shine a spotlight on the process and allow us to move further along than the very frustrating situation we have in Myanmar at the moment.

Frankly, if we only have changes to our sanctions regimes as outlined in the government's response to this report, it's not going to move us any further at all for deeply distressing situations like in Myanmar, where the case for Australia applying targeted sanctions is so, so strong—the most awful and egregious human rights abuses are being conducted by the military junta in Myanmar, and citizens are being killed on the streets. Yet Australia is not willing, at the moment, to sanction these people. We're not willing to say, 'You are not welcome here.' We're not willing to say, 'Your funds aren't welcome here.' We are not willing to say that family members who are benefitting from the coup are not welcome here. These are actions that we can take. These are the types of actions that are outlined in Magnitsky legislation, as is being developed and implemented all around the world. This matters because human rights matter, and what is going on in Myanmar matters so much.

I want to take you to the situation with regard to COVID in Myanmar at the moment. Recent media coverage has described how the military junta are basically using COVID as a biological weapon. They have weaponised COVID. There was an article in the ABC online just a week or so ago that talked about how the 'military junta has clamped down on the sale of oxygen cylinders, forcing thousands to queue for hours, sometimes in defiance of lockdown orders, at times drawing a violent response from troops.' Soldiers opened fire to disperse a line of people queuing to buy oxygen in Yangon.

Myanmar activist groups and doctors say that they've documented more than 200 attacks on health workers and facilities that have left at least 17 people dead, and they estimate that more than 400 arrest warrants have been issued for physicians who have taken part in the civil disobedience movement. One doctor working in a remote town in Myanmar said that he was desperately searching for more oxygen supplies, as the medical centre he worked at was filling up with COVID-19 patients:

'We are trying to get oxygen cylinders every day but it is hard,' he told the ABC.

'The military are trying to take the cylinders from some plants because their first priority is for army families and then second the military hospitals.'

Another doctor told the ABC that soldiers went straight to a local plant and seized hundreds of cylinders, which were then hoarded for military families or sent to military facilities. He said that people are staying home, but they cannot get oxygen at home, so they are getting very sick. 'They are either getting better or they die,' he said. Another medic told the ABC:

… the junta was happy to let the virus rip through areas of the country which it believed were hostile to the military regime.

'They [the army] are killing us,' …

It is this sort of appalling behaviour by regimes like the military junta in Myanmar that Australia has the ability to address through a properly constructed, powerful Magnitsky-style legislative framework.

As I said, we will certainly scrutinise the legislation that was foreshadowed in the government's response to us on Thursday, and we welcome the long-delayed response to our committee report. But we call upon the government to do more: take the responsibility that Australia can take to have a regime that allows us to apply targeted sanctions and that has the transparency and independence to enable us to apply those targeted sanctions so that we can use the power that we have to address egregious human rights abuses, such as those that we are seeing in Myanmar, as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Comments

No comments