If drug couriers are likely to face the death penalty if caught and convicted in a foreign country - and their home country doesn’t have capital punishment - should police from their home country still tip off those foreign authorities or just wait until they return home and then arrest them?
This issue, which came up in the case of the Bali Nine, has been raised again in light of the arrest in Vietnam of an Australian couple on charges of attempted heroin smuggling. Vietnamese airport officials alleged Nguyen Van Huy, aged 36, and his 39-year-old wife, Hoang Le Thuy, had 500 grams of heroin hidden away in bottles of medication in their baggage, as they attempted to fly from Ho Chi Minh City back to their hometown of Melbourne. Their three daughters, aged between two and 10, were travelling with them and have been handed over to relatives. They face possible decades away from their parents.
The forum was the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio program AM, even though in this case the couple were 100 grams short of the death penalty range:
The latest arrests in Vietnam have striking similarities to those of the Bali Nine, who were arrested after Indonesian authorities were tipped off by Australian Federal Police.
AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty has insisted that despite the fact some of the Bali Nine now face the death penalty, he makes no apologies for Australia’s law enforcement bodies tipping off their overseas counterparts.
Mick Keelty says it isn’t possible for police on the ground in other countries to make a judgement call about whether a suspect may ultimately face the death penalty.
But the Federal Opposition’s spokesman on justice and customs, Senator Joe Ludwig, says there needs to be clear guidelines for Australian authorities acting on potential death penalty cases overseas.
JOE LUDWIG: What there does need is clear guidelines so that our police can act with confidence when they are faced with pre-death penalty charge situations.
It would be helpful for them to have guidelines that they can then operate within. It would also be able to ensure that the officers themselves aren’t put in positions of making moral decisions of this magnitude. And, more to the point I think, our officers wouldn’t want to be placed in that position either.
It’s an interesting point that raises several issues:
1) In the first place, is it the responsibility of Australian authorities to save its citizens from the consequences of their bad decisions?
2) The Australian government has on many occasions lobbied on behalf of their citizens facing the death penalty and in some cases succeeded. That there are still opportunities for clemency could be construed as an argument against intervening before any legal judgement has been passed down. Or it could go the other way, in that if the government is willing to intervene in death penalty cases after the fact, why not before, particularly as appeals are not always successful.
3) What impact would these guidelines have on the working relationship between police in Australia and their foreign counterparts - in particular southeast Asian countries? Might not the latter be less likely to be cooperative in the future if they knew that Australian police were withholding information from them? Or are the lives of Australian drug couriers more valuable than these relations?
4) Would foreign authorities be less likely to grant clemency if they knew Australian authorities were withholding information? If yes, could this not be to the detriment of a particular citizen who Australian authorities didn’t have information on?
5) Does not the ultimate responsibility lie with the person who acted despite the known risks, as well as the country they tried to smuggle drugs through that put the death penalty on their books? Is it fair to drag police into the discussion?
