News from Tibet

For some reason the latest of many stories I keep up with from Tibet, where I have travelled, prompts me to share it with you.  Maybe it’s the contrast with the case of wrongfully convicted Steven Avery, the subject of ‘Making a Murderer’ (did you hear that Brendan Dassey’s conviction has just been overturned?).  Maybe it’s that I too have a 6-ish year old, whose school is forever receiving delegations of kids from China who, and their parents before them, have likely been fed exclusively propaganda about Tibet which they no doubt consider to be a fractious and backward, quaintly religious outpost of neo-feudalists, a wild west.  Maybe it’s the people smuggler angle.  Maybe it’s the amazement at finding a story which causes the Don Dale saga to pale into comparative insignificance. Maybe it’s a frustration with the self-censorship about China which is so pervasive, and the near-complete control by the Communist Party of China of even Australian media (Chinese language media, to be precise).  Maybe it’s that this case has been thoroughly investigated by New York’s Human Rights Watch, whom I trust absolutely, and whose 108 page report forms the basis of much of what follows.

Who knows? But here goes with the short version (I’m going to assume the Tibetans’ suspicions are correct, which seems fair to me, given the Chinese authorities’ lack of enthusiasm for sharing and enthusiasm for repeatedly cremating details of the case). The Chinese framed one of the most senior supporters of the Dalai Lama still in Tibet, Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, himself a venerated lama with a philanthropic flair. They charged him with financing a terrorist bombing, sentenced him to death in a mockery of a trial along with a co-accused whom they probably procured to implicate Tenzin Delek by torturing him.  Delek’s, but not the co-accused’s, sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

The Chinese tortured Delek for 13 years, beating him, starving him, throwing boiling or freezing water over him, all the while sarcastically suggesting he use some of his magic lama powers.  They hurriedly cremated him inside the prison without an autopsy after his death in jail, locked his grieving sister and her daughter up without charge for weeks and released them only after trying to have them promise they would not publicly suggest he was poisoned, and harassed or detained 60-80 supporters at around the same time 100 human rights lawyers and activists were thrown into jail. All of which prompted the super-cool looking niece Nyima Lhamo, pictured, to pay people smugglers $10,000 to trudge her across the Himalaya to Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s place of exile in the Indian Himalayas, to tell the story, leaving to the depravities of infuriated Chinese officials her ailing mother and 6 year old daughter.

And guess what? Since I started this post, news has reached me that the mother and daughter have gone missing after being detained by Chinese police. And news has also come to my attention of the propaganda video with a purported confession of a prominent lawyer arrested in the 2015 arrests.  As the Washington Post put it, ‘Wang rips apart her entire career of human rights law. Speaking in mellifluous tones while sitting underneath a tree, she denounces her former colleagues and refuses to accept a prestigious human rights prize awarded to her by the American Bar Association.’  The op ed explains how this is achieved: ‘…  the authorities might move to physical torture, including chaining detainees to a “tiger bench” in excruciating positions for days and sometimes weeks, applying electric shocks to their genitals, jolting and beating them with electric police batons, or placing them in long solitary confinement, to name a few. Some activists have been so traumatized as to be unable to speak after being released from detention …’.

Continue reading “News from Tibet”

VCAT finds practitioner guilty of conduct prejudicing administration of justice

I only learnt in the last few years that Melbourne is one of the world’s great Jewish cities, with a globally significant series of communities of orthodox adherents.  One of those orthodox communities has delivered up an interesting case.  In Victorian Legal Services Commissioner v AL [2016] VCAT 439, VCAT’s Acting President recently found a well known Melbourne solicitor guilty of two counts of professional misconduct, constituted by breaches of each limb of r. 30.1.2 of the solicitors’ professional conduct rules.

The rule prohibited conduct calculated to, or likely to a material degree to be, prejudicial to the administration of justice, or to diminish public confidence in the administration of justice, or adversely to prejudice a practitioner’s ability to practise according to these rules.

The practitioner’s disciplinary offence was first to state privately to his client’s father his disappointment after an orthodox Jew sitting watching someone else’s case in court had gone out of his way from the well of the court to assist police in the middle of a bail hearing in a criminal prosecution of the practitioner’s client. His second offence was committed when the man, whom I will refer to as the complainant since he lodged the disciplinary complaint which led to the practitioner’s disciplinary prosecution, rang the practitioner and asked him about comments to similar effect which the man had heard the practitioner had made, taping the call. The practitioner expressed directly to the man similar sentiments, expressly invoking the Jewish principle of ‘mesirah’ by which Jews who cooperated with secular authorities against fellow Jews in times and places where Jews enjoyed imperfect protection were ostracized. Jewish authorities have repeatedly said that the principle has no operation in modern day Australia in relation to criminal matters.

The Age has reported, in an article prominently featuring the practitioner, that victims of Jewish abusers have been pressured not to cooperate with police. It reported the Legal Services Commissioner as saying that ‘there was a general principle that made it impermissible for a lawyer to tell a witness they could not inform police about a matter because of a religious or community rule.’ I do not mean to criticise the Commissioner in this regard, because The Age sought his comments prior to the Commissioner’s receipt of the complaint, and the Commissioner was presumably simply responding to a general question about lawyers’ obligations towards witnesses in their cases. But what VCAT’s decision demonstrates is that the practitioner’s comments occurred after the conduct in question which the practitioner believed to have involved false statements based on misinformation, and were directed to a person who was not a witness and who, as far as the practitioner was aware, was simply someone who stood up in the well of the court and interfered in his client’s case. Given that, as far as the practitioner is said to have known, the man who stood up in court had no further role to play in the case or in his client’s drama more generally, it is hard to see how the practitioner could be said to have intended to pressure the man as a victim of a Jewish abuser not to cooperate further with the police in the future in bringing the abusers to justice, as seems to have been the implication. Continue reading “VCAT finds practitioner guilty of conduct prejudicing administration of justice”

Submissions on penalty in regulatory proceedings like ASIC and disciplinary prosecutions

The Federal Court has given a landmark decision about regulatory prosecutions.  In federal jurisdictions and state jurisdictions which follow the new decision, professional disciplinarians like ASIC and Legal Services Commissioners will no longer be able to enter into plea bargains in the expectation that the court or tribunal hearing them will rubber stamp the agreed outcomes so long as they are ‘within the permissible range’ of penalties.  But nor will disciplinary prosecutors be able to submit what the appropriate penalty ought to be.  Rather, they will be limited to making submissions about the appropriate sentencing principles, and about similar outcomes in similar cases.

The powerful judgment is at odds with a paragraph of dicta in a recent decision of the Victorian Court of Appeal in that it applies the High Court’s decision in Barbaro, a criminal case, to the quasi-criminal realm.  How the case plays out in Victoria remains to be worked out, but if this case goes to the High Court (and both sides have filed special leave applications), all that may change. Certainly the settlement of proceedings by regulators just got more complicated.

There seems to be a discrepancy about fundamental norms of government between the dicta of our Court of Appeal and the ratio of the Federal Court’s decision.  Once that gets resolved, however, each piece of legislation setting up the regulatory regime must be construed against the backdrop of those fundamental norms, and might give rise to different outcomes.  The Federal Court approached the task of working out how Barbaro applies in regulatory prosecutions in an orthodox fashion, i.e. by a process of statutory construction based on a close textual analysis of the legislative scheme as a whole.

The Chief Justice of the Federal Court allocated three judges to hear a preliminary question in the regulatory prosecution at first instance, in which the parties had already agreed on a proposed outcome, the result of a settlement (or, if you will, a plea bargain).  The proceeding was brought against the CFMEU and the judgment’s aim was apparently to sort out once and for all if, and how, the High Court’s decision in Barbaro is to apply in proceedings for a penalty.  The mouthful of a case is reported as Director, Fair Work Building Industry Inspectorate v Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union [2015] FCAFC 59, but seems set to be called ‘the CFMEU Case’.

It’s quite a judgment: indignant, keen to cut cant, and argued from first principles in relation to the place of the courts in civil society.  It is a further step in the demolition of the nonsense about disciplinary proceedings being sui generis, fundamentally distinct from criminal prosecutions, and (oh, spare me!) protective and not punitive in a way which means the protection of those against whom punishment is sought need not be extended.  The   punishment of citizens is, and must be seen to be, a job for the courts (except where parliament has expressly provided otherwise); where the State is seeking to punish citizens the label applied to the proceedings is a distraction; and in such cases, the Courts having been tasked with ascertaining the appropriate penalty, they must do so conscientiously themselves, however convenient it might be for them, for regulators, and for the regulated, to cede that task to a regulator which is part of the machinery of the executive arm of government, and to pay lip service to the inquiry conducted by the Court into the appropriateness of a deal done behind closed doors.  So said the Court.

The indignation extends to the many judges and other decision makers who have convinced themselves post-Barbaro that the decision does not apply  to them, often on the basis that criminal proceedings are special and proceedings for a penalty are civil proceedings and nothing like criminal prosecutions.  Distinguishing Barbaro away has been de jour. Continue reading “Submissions on penalty in regulatory proceedings like ASIC and disciplinary prosecutions”

2014, not such a great year (beheadings, ebola, deforestation)

Russia Back, after that long excursion (structure is for advices; meandering is for holiday blog posts), to aviation. In the middle of the year, 414 people died in plane crashes within a week when a Malaysian Airlines and an Air Algerie aircraft crashed in Ukraine (killing 27 Australians) and Mali respectively. The former was shot down and the question is to what extent Russia was directly involved. Continue reading “2014, not such a great year (beheadings, ebola, deforestation)”

2014: not such a great year (planes, boats, Sri Lanka)

It felt like it was surely the worst year ever for plane crashes.  In fact, many more civilians used to die in aviation disasters each year for a long time, and the figures were even less dramatic when expressed as passenger deaths per million flights. 2014 was actually the year in which there were the fewest fatal civilian passenger airline crashes even though more than 1000 people perished. But planes do not generally go missing, never to be found.  And nice countries like Russia don’t generally shoot them down either, so it was all certainly newsworthy.

Just weeks ago, an Air Asia flight crashed into the sea in Indonesia with 162 people on board.  We will come to the crashes in Ukraine and Algeria later on. Early on in 2014, a Malaysian Airlines plane carrying 239 people  disappeared without a trace.  What to make of the fact that the pilot’s wife reportedly moved out with their children the day before, and that he did not make any social or professional plans for after the flight? the world’s people wondered in an orgy of circumstantial reasoning which never really went anywhere.

In fact, there was a precedent in 2014 for pilots doing strange things. An unarmed co-pilot locked the pilot out of the cockpit while he was taking a leak and diverted an Ethiopian Airlines flight scheduled from Addis to Rome so as to land in Geneva where he sought political asylum.  I can understand why a man might want to get out of the economic proto-powerhouse Ethiopia is becoming 30 years after the famine (it imports 10 million litres of wine): dissidents are not tolerated. But why not just get out in Rome, and seek asylum there, avoiding the likely 20 years in jail for hijacking? Continue reading “2014: not such a great year (planes, boats, Sri Lanka)”

2014, not such a great year (intro)

Welcome back then.  2014 was a lovely year in Melbourne, but damn was it an awful year in a lot of other places. Spectacular aviation disasters bookended and bisected the year.  In fact it was probably these disasters which got me off my holiday butt for the first time since 2007 to write a wrap of the year, but as we will see the aviation fatalities statistics are not particularly remarkable.  Much more dreadful things happened or came fully to light, as we will also see.  (This is part 1.  Part 2 is here.  Part 3 is here.  And Part 4 is here.)

We began to focus on Boko Haram when they seized an exam hall full of aspirant physicists and sold the Nigerian schoolgirls into slavery.  The State, deeply infiltrated by the nutcase insurgents, seemed paralysed in response.  Up the coast, a plague raged which had desperately poor people hemorrhaging painfully to death in gutters, untouchable, unaided though all they really needed was logistics and saline drips.  Mediaeval atrocities were meted out in a purported Islamic caliphate willy nilly by the other arm of ISIS.  (It may be preferable to refer to these nutjobs as Dai’sh (the Arabic acronym) so as to repudiate the brigands’  invocation of Islam. The French are quite diligent in this respect and The Age suggested that this created a particular hatred in the minds of Islamic extremists which has now played out in 2015.)

A young French economist put out a 700 page economics treatise on inequality which unpredictably  became in 2014 a number one bestseller on Amazon. Then he declined to receive the Legion d’Honneur.  Meanwhile, Earth’s richest 400 people got about $115 billion richer (so that they now have $1.4 trillion, roughly Australia’s 2014 GDP).  In fact, the richest 1% of people own nearly half the world’s financial wealth, according to a 2014 report, while the poorest 50% own less than than the richest 85 people. In fact,  the richest 1% are set to own more than the other 99% by the end of this year, according to Oxfam. All this became mainstream discussion because of Pikkety.  Bill Gates came out and agreed with many of Thomas Pikkety’s theses and conservatives generally felt free publicly to agree that extreme wealth disparity was not entirely idyllic, which seems like a change to me.

Naomi Klein published This Changes Everything, arguing persuasively that tinkering around the edges of the climate change disaster, as we are, is doomed to failure.  She’s talking about a revolution.  Robert Manne, a former editor of Quadrant and ardent anti-communist, described it in a magazine published by a wealthy property developer as ‘among the most brilliant and important books of recent times‘.  It rammed home to me the message that, 20 years into the desultory climate talks we have been having, the spewing of CO2 has only increased annually.  All we ever do is argue about how much we might promise to reduce, in the future, the rate of the spewAnd then it was, worldwide, the hottest and most CO2 soiled year ever, with the greatest increase in CO2 emissions.  Something, no doubt, to do with the fact observed by Vaclav Smil, which rose to prominence last year, that China has in recent times used as much concrete in three years as America did in the 20th century. Last year was the third hottest year for Australia since records began — almost a whole degree hotter than the 1960-1990 average — and the second hottest years since records began in Victoria and NSW.  Last year concluded Australia’s hottest ever 24 months.

A US Senate Committee published a report (read it here) on the CIA’s joint venture with Gaddafi, Assad, and Mubarak to torture people between 2002 and 2006.  Its 600 pages have been well summarised thus:

“The torture was far more brutal than we thought, and the CIA lied about that. It didn’t work, and they lied about that too. It produced so much bad intel that it most likely impaired our national security, and of course they lied about that as well. They lied to Congress, they lied to the president, and they lied to the media. Despite this, they are still defending their actions.”

Of course the issue in 2014 of the report was good news, since it is rare for regimes engaged in terrible breaches of international law to investigate thoroughly and then publish the detailed report.  But as we will see, its contents were bad news from not so long ago, brought to light.  So was the fact that it represented a blip on most people’s radars, if they learnt of it at all.  And so was the fact that, as far as I can tell from down here at the bottom of the world, nothing changed.  Obama said hokily ‘We tortured some folk’, a grotesque sentence even before the addition of ‘It’s important for us not to feel sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job those folks had.’  (You see?  The victims and the torturers were all the kind of kind and ordinary people that go to folk festivals, together.)  Well, I for one feel sanctimonious about those miserable sadistic nobs who trashed the values they purport to police and then spread lies to the media in an entirely successful propaganda campaign.  Dick Cheney continues to tell lies in his response to the report.

There was so much terrible, terrible war: South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Syria, Dai’sh, extra-judicial executions by drones.  So many beheadings and crucifixions, including a couple of westerners, Aussie kids with severed heads.  Nice white people doing things like invading, and annexing the neighbours under cover of preposterous propaganda worthy of the Chinese or North Korean regimes. So terribly little talk of peace, and international law and, domestically, the rule of law.  The absolute contempt for the most fundamental norms of international law — peaceful resolution of disputes, non-acquisition of sovereignty by conquest, minimum standards for the treatment of captured enemies, the prohibition of torture, non-refoulement — has to be corrosive of the rule of domestic law.  I feel relatively safe in saying that that can’t be good.  That is all I’m saying in much of what follows because, for example, I wouldn’t have a clue about how happy the people of Crimea are to be back in the bosom of Mother Russia, and am not really sure what I would do if I were Immigration Minister; I just know what I would not be doing.  (More — quite a lot actually — to follow in the coming days)