Rather His Own Man

by Geoffrey Robertson

  The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, and his president (and now Supreme Leader) Ali Khamenei ordered that the many thousands of prisoners in Iranian jails who supported a left-wing opposition should be destroyed. The signal was given and the prisons went into lockdown: these young men and women were blindfolded and ordered to join a conga line which led straight to the gallows. They were hung from cranes, four at a time or in groups of six; from ropes in front of stages at assembly halls; some were taken to army barracks at night, directed to make their wills and then shot by firing squad. Their bodies were doused with disinfectant, packed in refrigerated trucks and buried by night in mass graves. Two months later the same process was applied to male prisoners who were atheists – female atheists were (for abstruse theological reasons) whipped five times a day until they either converted or died. Families were not allowed to know where their loved ones were buried and even today are not allowed to mourn them. Many thousands were killed in this way by Iran’s theocratic state – without trial, without appeal and utterly without mercy.

  My report was the first detailed account of this atrocity to be published.3 It identified the perpetrators, many of whom are now in high positions in the Iranian state (the minister of Justice at the time of writing this was a main organiser). These men deserve to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity and their interest in obtaining nuclear weapons must be stopped at all costs – even the cost of Obama’s deal, which I criticised at the time for not being made contingent on improvement in Iran’s human rights record. I warned about this dangerous theocratic state in Mullahs without Mercy: Human Rights and Nuclear Weapons, and my hostility to the regime remains undimmed, notwithstanding the election of a more liberal president – who remains under the thumb of his cruel Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards. I have sometimes found myself acquainted with strange bedfellows – on conference platforms between Rudy Giuliani and John Bolton, for example – but on this subject if on few others we are on the same side (although my reasoning is different).

  In 2009 I wrote a book about a very different kind of state – the Vatican, which should not be a state at all – and how it has connived at the torture, through sexual abuse, of children. The project began with a call from Christopher Hitchens, an old friend who knew of my interest in crimes against humanity – I had discussed them on The Trials of Henry Kissinger, the documentary based on Hitch’s book. What did I think about the reports emerging from Ireland and Boston about paedophile priests, and the apparently endemic child abuse in Catholic institutions? Did I think this might amount to an international crime? I told Hitch I would get back to him, and I did, some months later, after studying court reports, the available psychiatric evidence and immersing myself in the mysteries of canon law and the law relating to statehood.

  My response was The Case of the Pope: Vatican Responsibility for Human Rights Abuse.4 There was no doubt that paedophile priests, and other clergy who took advantage of kids trained to revere them as the agents of God, had bewitched, buggered and bewildered hundreds of thousands of children in their care, in a scandal covered up by bishops and cardinals throughout the world to avoid reputational and financial damage to the Church. Overseen by a special commission in the Vatican responsible for canon law (headed by Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict), they had kept these crimes a secret from local police, while abusive priests had quietly been moved to other parishes, where they had reoffended.

  Pope Benedict had become an enemy of human rights by exploiting the UN decision to grant ‘statehood’ to the Vatican (which did not, in my legal opinion, qualify for it – for one thing it’s a country where no children are born, except by accident). He insisted on vetoing all UN initiatives for family planning, contraception and what he called ‘the sinister ideology of women’s empowerment’. He regarded homosexuality as ‘evil’. He had rallied the Catholic countries of Latin America to make common cause with Muslim states like Libya and Iran to veto, for example, the UN’s projected ‘right to sexual health’. But his responsibility for widespread and systematic child abuse made him a candidate for criminal investigation. ‘Put the Pope in the Dock’ was how the Guardian headlined my findings, although I insisted on calling the book The Case ‘of’, rather than ‘against’– readers could judge for themselves.5

  The book was well reviewed in Britain; in Australia the reception was mixed: a couple of ABC ‘religious correspondents’ did not seem able to grasp there was a problem within the Church, and an elderly Catholic QC who had fronted George Pell’s wholly inadequate Melbourne Response threatened to sue me for libel – threats that he never made good. I had an ‘I told you so’ moment in early 2017 when Australia’s Catholic archbishops appeared at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, red-robed but as if in the dock, to apologise for what one of them, Archbishop Fisher (whom I had talent-spotted when a young priest and put on several Hypotheticals), described as ‘criminal negligence’. It certainly was, although the negligence was shared by journalists who chose not to uncover the scandal and the many who turned a blind eye when it was revealed.

  I did at least discover one hero. Maurie Crocker was the parish priest at Dapto, my childhood stomping ground. A former pugilist, he set up a boxing club so the local youth could take out their aggressions on a punching bag. Priests in the area knew of a particularly vicious paedophile gang involving Maurie’s superiors and Wollongong police chiefs, who passed small boys around the ring, but he was the only one with the courage to blow the whistle – to a local paper. The paedophiles were subsequently prosecuted and jailed. Was Maurie congratulated? Of course not. His fellow clergy ostracised him – sent him to Coventry, or at least to Fairy Meadow, on the outskirts of Wollongong, where in consequence he committed suicide.

  The Case of the Pope provided evidence relied upon by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, which in 2014 condemned the Vatican for putting children in peril. Ratzinger, the ostrich pope, retired when he became too old to cope and was replaced by a better man. Pope Francis has not, however, brought in the reforms that are essential if the scourge of child abuse is to be stopped. That will require the church to raise the age of communion and confession from seven (at which age kids are so readily brainwashed into reverence for the priesthood) to thirteen or fourteen, when they are more capable of resisting sexual advances and may have more confidence to report them. I have noticed, however, some changes – at La Madeleine, the majestic cathedral in Paris, confession boxes have been replaced by glass offices, where priests sit in open view, their hands on the table, to hear confessions.

  Bangladesh is a Commonwealth country where my books are on the law syllabus and my arguments for prosecuting those responsible for the hideous genocide of 1971 have been well received – so well that they have set up the ‘International Crimes Tribunal’ to try the Islamists who collaborated with the Pakistani army in killing the students, intellectuals and teachers who might have led this breakaway state, as well as participating in massacres of hundreds of thousands of Hindus. I applauded the determination of the government to provide a reckoning, even forty years later, and although the worst culprits were depraved and dissolute Pakistani generals, there is no doubt that they were assisted by members of local Islamic factions, some of whom rose to be ministers in later governments and are now opposition leaders. What I did not applaud was the fact that the International Crimes Tribunal has no international judges or lawyers and that it sentences almost all its convicts to hang by the neck until they are dead. Most of the defendants are political enemies of the current government, which doubly delights in sending them to the gallows. It was ironic to read the first appeal decision by the Bangladesh Supreme Court, which justified the tribunal’s existence with lengthy quotes from Crimes Against Humanity, yet ended by deciding that all its convicted prisoners should be executed. I wrote a report for a human rights organisation that emphasised the legal and political folly of imposing such death sentences.6
(After most executions, there are riots in which numbers of citizens are killed.) My efforts were not appreciated and one minister publicly called on the government to arrange for my ‘punishment’.7 I am not sure how this would be administered, but I doubt that I will be returning to find out.

  Then there was Sri Lanka, on which I reported for the Bar Association of England and Wales.8 In 2009 government forces – especially its navy – launched a massive bombardment of the Tamil community in the north, killing up to 70,000 (mostly civilians) and displacing 350,000. The government of Mahinda Rajapaksa banned the media and denied any wrongdoing, but soon the truth emerged, captured in fleeting and grainy images on mobile-phone cameras, of summary executions; naked female bodies on the beach violated and drowned; lines of captives in handcuffs, shot where they were standing. The undoubted viciousness of the Tamil Tigers could not justify these reprisals against Tamil civilians and my reports urged the establishment of a war crimes court. The nation’s chief justice, Shirani Bandaranayake, ruled in favour of Tamils in a dispute with the government and Rajapaksa, in fury, insisted on her dismissal. He had a majority in Parliament and his MPs, lacking all integrity, voted to impeach Bandaranayake on charges which were obviously false and fabricated. The Sri Lankan navy celebrated her dismissal with a firework display. It was an outrageous attack on judicial independence, a value that protects all citizens. My report cleared Bandaranayake of all the charges and she was reinstated as chief justice when Rajapaksa was overthrown, but I felt that some sanctions were in order for his MPs who had colluded in her removal. That was far from the mind of Tony Abbott – he rewarded the Sri Lankan navy with two new corvettes, despite the fact that it had taken thousands of innocent lives.

  There has been some progress in administering international justice since the Pinochet case, but the system’s stumbling block is the inability of the pole-axed UN Security Council to agree on taking actions against violating states and their leaders. The worst example is Syria. In 2011 I wrote an article for the UK’s Independent newspaper, ‘Assad Should Face International Justice’.9 In it I pointed out that President Assad’s deliberate decision to use tanks, machine guns and poison gas over seven weeks against unarmed civilians already amounted to a crime against humanity. Only 800 protestors had been killed at that stage, but as the toll mounted to more than 400,000 over subsequent years, the Security Council always declined to refer Assad to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court because Russia blocked any action against its ally.

  There are some international courts and tribunals available to deal with individual cases, but whether their decisions are binding on a sovereign state depends on whether that state has signed up to the particular convention. Obviously states that want to continue violating human rights do not sign up. So there must be additional actions that democratic countries like Australia could take on their own. One such measure I have been advocating is a ‘Magnitsky law’. This is named in memory of Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer and whistleblower who complained to the authorities in Moscow about how companies belonging to his client Bill Browder had been scammed by highly placed police and tax officials. He was immediately arrested and thrown in prison, where judges ordered him to remain for a year despite serious illness. He was tortured, and died in his prison cell. To be clear, Vladimir Putin – rootin’ tootin’ shootin’ Putin – did not kill Sergei Magnitsky. He was killed by middle-ranking officials of Putin’s corrupt state apparatus – by a criminal gang of policemen and tax officials, with the help of tame judges and prosecutors. The judges were like the train drivers to Auschwitz, turning a blind eye to the inhumanity they were helping to perpetrate, denying bail to a sick man wrongly detained by corrupt police.

  The police and tax officials who had scammed Browder’s companies, and their accomplices, were safe in Russia, of course, but that’s not where they wanted to keep or spend the proceeds of their crime. So Browder led an international campaign to stop them enjoying their ill-gotten gains anywhere else – to freeze their assets in Western banks and deny them entry to countries with the casinos that were their favourite haunts.

  President Obama signed the US Magnitsky Act in 2012, targeting several Russian judges along with the crooked police and tax officials. Putin’s furious first response was to stop the adoption of Russian orphans by American families. Then, more logically, he introduced his own Magnitsky law, which targeted American military officials who ran Guantanamo Bay, although they had no money in Russian banks and are unlikely to want to holiday in the Kremlin.

  A Magnitsky law cannot reach heads of state or diplomats who have privileges and immunities, but it may deter others who carry out their orders, who profit from crimes against humanity and want to stash their cash in more stable countries. A strong Magnitsky law has been adopted in Canada, and the idea is now being taken up by the European Parliament: if you can identify human rights violators abroad, you should proscribe them from entering your country. Also – and this is important – not allow them access to your banks, to your medical facilities or to your schools. Of course, normally we try not to visit the sins of the father on the children, but in the case of corrupt and brutal officials I don’t see why not, because they are very often motivated by a desire to benefit their family. The nastiest man I have ever investigated – an Israeli general who had been profiting from illegal arms sales to the Medellin drugs cartel – once pleaded with me not to name him. ‘I only did it for my family. For the sake of my children.’ If their families are denied medical treatment in the West, if their children are barred from the playing fields of Eton and Geelong Grammar, that seems to me only fair.

  Why should Australia have a Magnitsky law? We are a financial hub in the Asia-Pacific region, envied for the stability of our banks, and the quality of our hospitals and schools. Our infrastructure should not be made available to those who abuse human rights, and we should become part of a global movement insisting the crooks stay in the country their corruption has emaciated.

  It is ironic, after all, that our refugee policy has become so obsessed with targeting the victims of human rights abuses. The government calls refugees ‘illegals’ as if they are dangerous criminals. It seems determined to punish them, although they are innocent people. We should be putting them on Hayman Island or Tasmania, not Nauru. The people we should really be keeping out of Australia are those who aid and abet the abuses – their families as well. For those who come across the sea in private jets, we should have no boundless plains to share.

  But we cannot pretend that fighting for human rights will overcome race venom, or religious hatred, or lust for power or money. I found it particularly tragic that the first political protestors to be killed in Syria back in 2011 held banners demanding ‘Assad to The Hague’. Their expectations of international justice were far too high. After a few thousand deaths they turned violent, and were violently supported by Al Qaeda and then ISIS, while Assad was lent violent support by Iran and then Russia. Now there is no end to the violence, and no end to the refugees (by 2017, half of Syria’s population). ISIS commits genocide against Yazidis and Coptic Christians, while NATO has been afraid to put boots on the ground. The UN has quietly offered to set up a Sierra Leone-style court in Baghdad to try captured ISIS leaders, but the Iraqi government has refused to co-operate because the court will be unable to pass death sentences.

  ‘Don’t you despair?’ people often ask. I do not, because belief in human rights takes hold in small places, and slowly spreads, from Nagorno-Karabakh to Norfolk Island. I have observed how far my own country has moved, since I grew up in it, to embrace beliefs that used to get us a police bashing. I have seen how the tyrants to whom we once wrote pathetic letters have later been arrested for their tyranny, how electronic communication has brought into being the global witness, and I have watched how those of my children’s generation have come to value the rights of people with whom, at their age, I was never concerned. And for all the enormity of our present problems – refuge
es, terrorism, climate change, Trump, et al. – the life I have sketched in this book has left me with faith in the one human quality that ultimately defines us as human. Not our power to speak or reason or love, or to subdue base instincts or achieve autonomy or worship gods, but our counterfactual capability for kindness. Human rights standards reflect our capacity to care for others and for future others. And that is why I believe they are worth fighting for.

  As for global justice, I have always seen it as a struggle that will continue for many years, as two steps forward are followed by one step back. For fifty years we failed to deliver on the Nuremberg legacy, and only since the turn of the century have we made any sort of start. There is a long way to go, but we will go in the right direction if we maintain the rage against atrocities inflicted on human beings anywhere in the world, and by making sure that the perpetrators do not in any way profit.

  Epilogue

  The expatriate’s nightmare – to be woken by telephone in the small hours and told that a parent is dying – finally happened to me on 21 December 2016. The call from my brother Tim in Sydney came at 5 am: ‘Mum’s critical, in hospital. She wants to say goodbye.’