Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I wish I could say the member for Mitchell was right, but he is wrong. There are two key reasons why the member for Mitchell misunderstands what this motion by the member for Barton, Mr McClelland, is about. The first—and he shares this with a number of people on the government side—is he has no faith in and no fundamental commitment to the United Nations as an agency for binding together the varied nations of this earth to take concerted action.

Why is this asking for an international and binding convention? So that it can be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court in The Hague; not so that Australia, Britain, France or any other individual country would have to do the work on its own and have no International Criminal Court to seek to take these matters to. In relation to genocide in the Balkans, Milosevic was able to be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court in The Hague and to be brought to justice because of the crimes in relation to genocide whilst he was in charge of his country and the crimes that he perpetrated.

It is a simple proposition. We live in a world that is composed not of individual countries that have no relationship to each other but of individual countries bound together in the United Nations. They can, if they sign up to an international convention, then try not just to outlaw but to take positive action against people who are associated, firstly, with genocide. That is how the international convention works in relation to that. Secondly, as the member for Barton and shadow minister for defence has argued, it is something novel, not historically but in terms of an international convention on suicide terrorism, that we should establish this in order to allow all the serried countries of the world to go to the International Criminal Court at The Hague and seek to prosecute not just the people who engage in suicide terrorism—if they are successful, they are dead—but the people who are supportive of them, those people involved with the education of youth or those religious and political leaders who make statements and give encouragement. We are dealing with the matter of inflammatory material broadcast by media outlets and made available on internet websites.

This motion goes not only to those people who aid and abet attempts at suicide terrorism but also to the key issue: so far, we do not have a single convention that focuses totally on suicide terrorism and these associated activities that allow it to happen. We cannot take a single head of state to task before the International Court of Justice in The Hague because we do not have a convention that would pin them to it. You can do that in relation to genocide but you cannot do it in relation to suicide terrorism. If you look specifically at what is proposed here, section 2(b)(iii) says:

... be punishable against constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals in the same form as Article 4 of the Genocide Convention

What the member for Mitchell misunderstands—and I am sure certain other members of the government would not misunderstand, including the chair of the defence committee—is that the series of conventions already in operation, which he iterated, from the early 1970s on were in response largely to single incidents or campaigns of terrorism. These go right back to suicide terrorists who had grabbed a plane and said: ‘Okay, we’ll take the plane. We’ve got all these people—we’ll hold them hostage.’ They either operated in airports or on planes. A lot of that went back to Yasser Arafat and the PLO. Most of those conventions were in relation to those individual attempts. This says there is a new category. We have seen that particularly in the last five years in Iraq, Palestine, Israel and elsewhere. We need a new mechanism to tie it together and to bring it to justice at the International Criminal Court.

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