‘Melbourne barrister Robert Richter and six leading Australian legal experts and former judges have publicly accused the Howard government of war crimes. They have called for the prosecution of the prime minister and other leading ministers over their collaboration with the Bush administration in the more than five-year illegal detention of David Hicks in Guantánamo Bay.
Robert Richter attacked the government in an op-ed comment, entitled “Hypocrites breaking our law at every turn,” published on February 18 in the Melbourne-based Sunday Age.
Directly accusing Attorney-General Philip Ruddock of being a liar, who had “publicly prostituted his duties to the law—and to those he owes a duty of protection,” Richter challenged the attorney-general to sue him for defamation over the article and “take the risk of the facts emerging in any litigation”.
Richter described Ruddock, Prime Minister John Howard and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer’s comments on Hicks as “damp-squib lies and deceptions” and said their calls for Hicks’s immediate prosecution in military commission trials were “a desperate cover-up of their government’s fundamental dereliction of duty”.
In a clear reference to the violation of the Australian criminal code and international law by the three government ministers, Richter said they had “made themselves complicit in procuring an illegal process to occur as soon as possible” and had “deliberately compound[ed] the illegal actions of the American Administration”.’
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