Canberra battling claims of hypocrisy as executions loom

CANBERRA - Australia has been urged to set up an Asian coalition against the death penalty as the looming executions of the Bali bombers and two Australian drug runners in Indonesia threaten to unleash new charges of hypocrisy against Canberra.

A paper by Sydney-based think tank, the Lowy Institute for International Policy, warns that Australia's silence on the imminent deaths of the Bali bombers both conflicts with its strong opposition to the execution of its own nationals and undermines its wider opposition to death sentences.

Dr Michael Fullilove, the institute's global issues programme director, also warns that Australia's approach to executions in Asia could harm its foreign policy goals and national interest.

"The problem is twofold," Fullilove says in his paper, Capital Punishment and Australian Foreign Policy. "Australian diplomacy is making little progress towards universal abolition [of the death penalty] ... and our bilateral relationships are being damaged because of our perceived hypocrisy on the issue."

Within Asia 15 countries impose the death penalty for "ordinary" crimes. At least 1770 people - more than 80 per cent of the known global total of executions - were executed in China last year and Singapore has the world's highest per-capita execution rate.

Last December, amid great outcry in Australia and despite appeals by Canberra, Australian drug smuggler Nguyen Tuong Van was hanged in Singapore. Three others remain on death row: Bali Nine drug runners Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran in Indonesia, and drug trafficker Trinh Huu in Vietnam. An unnamed fourth Australian faces murder charges in Lebanon that carry the death penalty.

Fullilove says Canberra is vigorous and often effective in acting for its nationals, succeeding after diplomatic pressure and personal lobbying by Prime Minister John Howard in commuting the death sentences imposed by Vietnam on Australian Mai Cong Thanh and permanent resident Nguyen Van Chinh.

But he argues that Australia needs to avoid sporadic and negative opposition and campaign against the death penalty for foreigners as well as its own nationals.

In the lead-up to Van Nguyen's execution the Singaporean and Malaysian media accused Australia of double standards, with one columnist asking: "Are the Australian Government and people suggesting that because he carried an Australian passport he is therefore above our laws?"

Fullilove urges a consistent approach, overcoming perceptions of hypocrisy generated when Howard urges clemency for Australians on death row while publicly declining to oppose the executions of the Bali bombers or, if sentenced to death, former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Fullilove also says Australia should push universal abolition as a diplomatic priority and create a regional coalition of Asian countries that have already abolished the death penalty to pressure others to join them, or to at least announce a moratorium on executions as a first step, limit the number and type of offences carrying the death penalty and abolish mandatory death sentences.