MEDIA RELEASE - 29 July 2008
Haneef Lawyers call for Royal Commission powers following the announcement that select submissions will not be made public.
Lawyers for Dr Mohamed Haneef have again called for Mr Clarke to be given Royal Commission powers after an announcement that selected submissions, and all results of questioning would not be made public.
Responding to the Clarke Inquiry’s increased secrecy level announced today, Dr Haneef’s lawyer, Rod Hodgson of Maurice Blackburn Lawyers, said that the current government had promised a full judicial inquiry. Mr. Hodgson said:
‘Whatever this Inquiry is, it is not judicial and it is not open. It is a very convenient result for the Australian agencies, especially the AFP and DIAC, in that they cannot be made accountable to the Australian public because of an alleged fear of offending a foreign government.
‘The credibility of what Mr Clarke is being told can be measured by DIAC’s actions in the recent freedom of information dispute. It began with over 200 documents in dispute. That number was whittled down to 6 in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, and only one of the over 200 documents, originally in dispute, was upheld by the AAT as being lawfully withheld.
‘We recommend that the public go to our submission available on the Clarke Inquiry’s website with all of its supporting documents to see the extent to which the documents which we have obtained suggest that the key agencies are incompetent, inconsistent and unable to get the facts right in the documents they produced during Dr. Haneef's ordeal.
‘More recently, the AFP’s unwillingness to comply with their legal obligations has been revealed. The recently provided first transcript of the arrest and interview of Dr. Haneef at Brisbane Airport revealed that the AFP failed to provide Dr Haneef with a lawyer when he asked for one. The transcripts that were recently handed over should have been given to Dr. Haneef's lawyers within a week of the interview. Despite this, they were only handed over, only last week, after counsel for the Clarke Inquiry requested them to do so.
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