Australia, explained.
“Hostage diplomacy” is increasingly used by authoritarian regimes as a tool of leverage over democratic countries and their foreign policy (Getty Images)
A new senate report has set out sensible recommendations for a fresh approach on wrongful detention of Australians overseas.
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Australia’s chance to align global efforts against “hostage diplomacy”Australia’s chance to align global efforts against “hostage diplomacy”
Last week the Australian Senate’s Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade handed down its report into the wrongful detention of Australian citizens overseas. A phenomenon that unfortunately only continues to grow, such wrongful detention (often referred to as “hostage diplomacy”) is increasingly used by authoritarian regimes around the world as a tool of leverage over democratic countries and their foreign policy. The United States, Canada, and some European countries have recognised the threat, and in recent years have crafted new strategies and institutions to “disincentivise” the practice.
Up until now Australia has stood back from this momentum, favouring what Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) calls “flexibility” in dealing with instances of wrongful detention on a case-by-case basis. I was one of those cases, imprisoned in Myanmar following the 2021 coup until November 2022.
The Senate committee effectively found against DFAT’s approach, and, drawing upon the testimony of Australians wrongfully detained (including from me), various interested groups, as well as overseas experts and practitioners, made a series of important recommendations, that the Australian government:
Moore-Gilbert and Robertson also expressed to the Committee their disappointment that Australia had not employed Magnitsky-style sanctions against individuals involved in wrongfully detaining Australians.
In its own submission to the Senate committee, DFAT pushed back against much of the above, including the idea that Australia had ever been subject to the sort of attempt at leverage implied by the term “hostage diplomacy”. This was rejected in the testimony of Kylie Moore-Gilbert, Director of the Australian Wrongful and Arbitrary Detention Alliance (and a hostage of the ruling regime of Iran for 805 days in 2018–20), and by the renowned Australian jurist Geoffrey Robertson. Both Moore-Gilbert and Robertson also expressed to the Committee their disappointment that Australia had not employed Magnitsky-style sanctions against individuals involved in wrongfully detaining Australians, despite the fact that such laws are part of Australia’s sanctions armoury. As Roberston put it:
If you look at the background to the Magnitsky laws … you will see that they come about because there are certain officials who are hand-in-glove or are part of an oppressive state who have been the direct perpetrators of … wrongful imprisonment. Now, judges were the first to be sanctioned in the original 2012 Magnitsky laws that came to pass in America, because judges and prosecutors do the work. They do the dirty work of the state against their own ethics in cases where they are bound to be independent and are meant to be objective, and they’re also, of course, quite wealthy. They go abroad, they want to send their families abroad to study at other universities, so they’re good targets. They are worried by incurring Magnitsky sanctions yet they don’t get sanctioned.
With the Senate committee’s report now tabled, it must be hoped that its eminently sensible recommendations, all of which align closely with the best practices of countries similarly vulnerable as Australia, will be seriously considered.
Listen to Lydia Khalil and Sean Turnell discuss hostage diplomacy, its personal and global impacts and what can be done about it.
About the author
Sean Turnell
Sean Turnell is a Nonresident Fellow at the Lowy Institute. He was previously a Senior Fellow in the Southeast Asia Program, specialising in macroeconomic policy, economic reform, and Myanmar. From 2016 to 2021, he served as senior economic adviser to Myanmar's democratic government, and was subsequently imprisoned for 650 days following the February 2021 military coup.
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