Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I am delighted to be able to speak to this motion which I think is very important for the parliament to debate. I was hoping that, given the nature of this debate, members opposite would also be supportive of the terms of it—given that Australia has been an abolitionist country for my entire life. The last man who was hanged in Australia was, I think, hanged two months before I was born. So Australia has not used the death penalty as a sanction against its own people for nearly 40 years. I think it is very important that we put on the record today—when there is action being taken all around the world in opposition to the death penalty—that although we are a country that does not use the death penalty any longer, we want to advocate for its abolition in other countries.

Obviously we need to be consistent in arguing not only that there should not be a death penalty in Australia but also that other countries around the world should not use this inhumane, degrading and barbaric form of punishment. We need to be able to argue on behalf of Australians who might have committed offences elsewhere that they should not be subject to the death penalty. I think it is important that this parliament note today that we not only advocate consistently on behalf of our own citizens; we also think that countries in our region and elsewhere around the world should abolish the death penalty for their own citizens as well as for any of ours who might be caught in their laws.

Both of the major parties in this country have had a longstanding opposition to the death penalty. We signed the international protocol many years ago, but it has not yet been passed into domestic law. I hope that the government will consider, in addition to a number of other issues that I want to raise today, whether some action can be taken to pass that convention into our domestic laws to make sure that, once and for all, Australia will never be able to reintroduce the death penalty.

I think members of this House would be aware that there are a vast number of countries that still do use the death penalty. There are 68 countries in the world that still use the death penalty for some offences, and 15 of those countries are in our region. It is a large number of countries. Those countries in our region also, unfortunately, have some of the highest rates of execution. It is something that we should engage with as a matter of interest in our region, not only for our own people but also for citizens of the world and for citizens of our Asian region.

One of the reasons that I wanted to have this debate today—and some people in the House would be aware of this—is that over recent years, unfortunately, a few comments have been made that are quite inconsistent with what we in the parliament think about the death penalty. I might say that on this issue both the Attorney-General, who is at the table, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs—who are the people most commonly asked about this issue—have had a longstanding opposition to the death penalty. They have spoken on it in many places. They have advocated on behalf of our citizens, they have been members of Amnesty International and they have supported calls for the death penalty to be abolished.

Unfortunately, the Prime Minister’s record is not so clear on this—and, unfortunately, neither is the record of the previous Leader of the Opposition, the former member for Werriwa. We had a situation several years ago where both the Prime Minister and the then Leader of the Opposition made some comments which might have sent mixed messages to the community about how we feel about the death penalty. So it is timely today, when the abolition of the death penalty is being called for in many other countries and parliaments around the world, that we, as the Australian parliament, reaffirm our commitment—I am hoping it is across the parliament—that the death penalty is not an appropriate form of punishment, no matter what the offence, no matter how great the anger and no matter how much distress people may feel about the offences that people have been involved in.

I do not think it is an easy thing to do in some situations, particularly when people look at the sorts of offences that have been committed. Of course, everybody on this side of the House would understand the inclination of those whose family members or loved ones might have been killed in the Bali bombings. Everyone understands the calls that people make in Iraq for Saddam Hussein to be executed. Everybody understands the entirely natural feeling of people whose families might have been affected by their loved ones falling victim to the drug trade and perhaps becoming addicts as a result of others who have been trafficking. All of those emotions are entirely justifiable and deserving of our sympathy. But we need to be able to say that nothing will be cured for those affected in this way if we advocate the death penalty. Nothing will be cured for those affected if we say that state sanctioned murder is a way of dealing with those people or bringing those people under our control.

We can of course say respectfully that we understand that other countries’ judicial processes need to be followed. But, at the same time, I think we need to be more consistent and more prepared to argue against the death penalty in other countries in our region—not just for Australians but also for others who are affected by those laws.

Have a look at the situation that we face at the moment. There are eight Australians currently on death row in China, Indonesia and Vietnam and another person has murder charges pending in Uganda, where the death penalty is available. This is something that we are going to have to deal with in the very near future. It is something that has been in our community and has been debated in recent times. We need this government—and it will be able to do it with our support—to take a more active and consistent role in expressing Australia’s opposition to the death penalty and to take the opportunity to use that as an initiative within our region.

I draw the House’s attention to an excellent paper that was written by Michael Fullilove, of the Lowy Institute. He argues that capital punishment should be an Australian foreign policy issue. I quote from his paper:

The best position from which to petition foreign governments on behalf of our nationals is that of consistent and strong opposition to the death penalty regardless of the nationality of the condemned. Such a stance would enable the government to deal with the issue positively and continually, rather than negatively and sporadically. It would increase the momentum to universal prohibition and bullet-proof us against claims of hypocrisy.

In this very important paper, he goes on to set out a range of initiatives that we could undertake within the region to try to further this issue. For example, he thinks that we could argue for countries that are already de facto abolitionist countries, such as Sri Lanka—which really does not use the death penalty, although it is still on its statute books—to take the next step and abolish the death penalty from their statute books. He thinks that we could call on countries in our region to announce a moratorium on executions and that we could call on these countries to restrict the numbers and types of offences for which capital punishment is imposed. He thinks that we could call on these countries to abolish mandatory death penalties like that imposed on Mr Nguyen, who was executed in Singapore last year; and there is a range of other things.

It is important for us to look at these practical initiatives, because this is not just something that we in this parliament want to say that we oppose; we have to say what further action could be taken. Can we make sure that we implement into our domestic law some clear statement that will make sure that there will never be a death penalty reintroduced in Australia? Can we express that view of the parliament more consistently by arguing within our region, as part of our foreign policy, that these sanctions should be removed not just against Australians when they are caught up in a foreign jurisdiction but also against all people, whether they live in Indonesia, China or any of the 68 countries that continue to have the death penalty?

Although I want to place on the record my clear acknowledgement and understanding that the Attorney and the Minister for Foreign Affairs have in the past had a very strong record on this issue, part of the reason that I am particularly concerned to debate this issue today is that we are fearful that the minister at the table, the Attorney, has been making a habit recently of walking away from some longstanding commitments in the human rights area.

The Attorney—who is sitting at the table and has on his Amnesty International badge—has been on the record many times saying that he is absolutely committed to the abolition of the death penalty and expressing his opposition to torture and other things, but then we have him in the media saying that he does not think sleep deprivation is torture. And not only does he not think sleep deprivation is torture but he also had the gall to say that he had never heard it put that way by anybody before, which seems fairly extraordinary to me.

Although the Attorney and I have disagreed on a number of things on many occasions, I generally had the view that the Attorney was relatively well informed. I find it surprising that the Attorney would not be aware that the KGB uses sleep deprivation as a type of torture during interrogations. I am also surprised that the Attorney does not know that South Africa, in its period of apartheid, used sleep deprivation as a type of torture. I also think the Japanese prisoners of war might have a view on this, as would people like the former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. He wrote about his experience of being tortured by the KGB and the impact that it had when he was deprived of sleep. He said:

In the head of the interrogated prisoner a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep ... Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger or thirst are comparable with it.

He also talks about the hallucinations, the paranoia, the disorientation and other things that people suffer if they are subject to sleep deprivation.

I am hoping—I am trying to be kind here, although it is occasionally difficult with the Attorney—that, in making these comments in Washington, the Attorney was perhaps suffering from some jet-lag himself. He may have been sleep deprived! It may be that he made that comment without fully thinking that he was being quite inappropriately dismissive of what can be a very serious form of torture. I have called on him to retract that comment. If he is going to continue to stand here—

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