Australian government declares it owes no legal duty to Guantánamo detainee David Hicks

Just last week, Prime Minister Howard made clear that he was aware that the US would release Hicks if the government requested it, and then repeated that no such request would be forthcoming.

David Hicks has been illegally incarcerated, in flagrant breach of the Geneva Conventions, for more than five years. He was first seized by Northern Alliance warlord elements in Afghanistan in November 2001, soon after the US invasion of that country. He was sold to the US military for a bounty, beaten and tortured, and taken to Guantánamo Bay, where he has been further abused and held in solitary confinement.

It was not until June 2004 that trumped-up charges were laid against him. Two years later, in June 2006, even these had to be abandoned when the US Supreme Court ruled that the Bush administration’s military commissions were illegal because their rules and procedures flouted the US Constitution and international law.

In what now amounts to an admission that the case against Hicks has always been baseless, all the charges against him have been dropped and replaced by a new and vague charge of “providing material support to a terrorist organisation”. In 2001, this was not an offence under US or Australian law. Yet, Hicks will face the “kangaroo court” military commissions having been retrospectively charged.

Hicks’s lawyers commenced an action in the Federal Court last December accusing Howard, Attorney-General Philip Ruddock and Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer of breaching their “protective duty” to Australian citizens overseas by failing to bring about a fair trial for their client.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/hick-m07.shtml