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Australian Lawyers And Amnesty Want Australian Returned From Guantanamo Bay

By Rod McGuirk 
Associated Press
31 October 2006
 
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) - Australia's top lawyers' group and human rights watchdog Amnesty International called on the government Wednesday to bring home the only Australian terror suspect still held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
 
The Law Council of Australia condemned the new system of military commissions recently approved by the U.S. Congress to try terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay, including Australian David Hicks.
 
"The Law Council's view is that David Hicks has no reasonable prospect of obtaining a fair trial," the council's president, Tim Bugg, told reporters in the national capital.
 
The council said it is concerned about aspects of the commissions including the admission of evidence extracted through coercion.
 
Amnesty International accused the Australian government of abandoning the 31-year-old Hicks and doing nothing to ensure he gets a fair trial. Hicks has been in custody since he was arrested in Afghanistan in December 2001 for allegedly fighting alongside the Taliban.
 
Amnesty Secretary General Irene Khan wrote an open letter to Prime Minister John Howard as part of the group's campaign to have Hicks released from Cuba.
 
Khan told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio on Wednesday that Hicks had become a "symbol of injustice and the impunity and non-accountability that Guantanamo has come to represent."
 
"He should come home; he should get justice here in Australia," she added.
 
The Law Council and Hicks' Pentagon-appointed lawyer Michael Mori agreed that the new system of military commissions would inevitably be appealed in the U.S. Supreme Court, resulting in years of delay in Hicks' case being resolved.
 
Mori said Hicks had been held in solitary confinement since March and was suffering the effects of spending 23 hours a day in a concrete cell where the lights were never switched off.
 
Mori, who visited his client in Cuba this month, said Hicks was "not doing well."
 
"I see the change in him, a sense of depression," Mori told reporters in Canberra where he planned to brief lawmakers.
 
"I think that's probably what they're shooting for -- they want to break him, they don't want him to resist," he added.
 
Hicks had pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder, conspiracy to commit war crimes and aiding the enemy. But those charges were withdrawn after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that the commissions were illegal.
 
Mori said he did not yet know what replacement charges Hicks would face.
 
The only other Australian held at Guantanamo, Mamdouh Habib, 50, flew home to Sydney last year at Australia's request after spending three years there without being charged.

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