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Amal Clooney fronts parliamentary hearing on sanctions for human rights abusers

Amal Clooney fronts parliamentary hearing on sanctions for human rights abusers

The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 May 2020

Below is an article published by The Sydney Morning Herald, Photo UK Mission to the UN/Lisa Englehart

High-profile human rights lawyer Amal Clooney has urged Australia to go after companies complicit in human rights abuses including against Uighur Muslims in China.

The Lebanese-British barrister on Friday morning appeared before a parliamentary inquiry into whether Australia should adopt Magnitsky-style laws against human rights offenders. .The Morrison government has initiated an inquiry into enacting legislation modelled on the US laws, which would give it the power to seize the assets of human rights offenders and ban them from entering the country.

The sanctions regime – which has also been adopted in Canada and Britain – allow for the imposition of visa and property-related sanctions on foreign individuals including government officials who are responsible for human rights abuses and serious corruption.

Ms Clooney said the Australian regime should also target companies which are linked to human rights violations, including in the Chinese government’s use of internment camps in the western province of Xinjiang where an estimated 1.5 million Uighur Muslims are being forcibly detained.

She said companies reacted to incentives and currently there were not a lot of measures in place discouraging them from being complicit in human rights abuses. She said the laws should allow the Australian government to go after companies and individuals who had been complicit in human rights abuses in Xinjiang, which “would be a positive”.

“We need to address the balance where it may be profitable to do these kinds of things and at the moment there are no penalties,” she said.

A number of large Chinese firms, including surveillance technology companies Hikvision and Dahua, have been banned in the US over concerns they were creating surveillance network in the Xinjiang region.

Ms Clooney’s comments come after businessman and political activist Bill Browder, who was instrumental in the original US laws, urged Australia to make sure no whole country, including China, was off limits if it decided to adopt the sanctions regime.

Adopting Magnitsky-style laws would allow Australia to become a global human rights leader and set an example for other countries in the region, Ms Clooney said.

The human rights lawyer urged Australia to make the laws broad enough to counter many types of human rights violations and corruption and they shouldn’t just target extrajudicial killings and torture but also sexual violence, corruption, persecution on grounds of race, religion or sexuality, detention on false charges and silencing of the media.

Ms Clooney said there should also be an independent expert committee to recommend individuals and companies that should be sanctioned or a parliamentary committee.

She said the laws would be effective because they did not target entire countries and didn’t disadvantage innocent citizens for the behaviour of their government officials.

“We have other tools that signal condemnation, but this is one of the few tools that raise the cost,” Ms Clooney said.

The deputy chair of the High-Level of Legal Experts on Media Freedom also praised Australia and New Zealand’s efforts in combating the coronavirus pandemic, saying she hoped “that trajectory continues to be a positive one”.

Ms Clooney warned the COVID-19 outbreak had made the international human rights crisis worse by allowing autocratic governments to give themselves sweeping new powers including criminalising so-called fake news.

She said genocide in Iraq and Myanmar and war crimes in Syria and Yemen remained unpunished as governments around the world were “distracted, divided and simply disinterested” during the global pandemic.

“You as leaders of one the world’s leading democracies can do something about the global human rights crisis,” she said.

“You may not be able to solve every problem in the world or respond to every abuse, but you can make sure your country is not a safe haven for despots and war criminals.”

Labor senator Kimberley Kitching said Ms Clooney made a strong and passionate case for holding to account government officials responsible for interning one million ethnic minority Muslims in forced labour camps in Xinjiang, as well as those who intimidate and murder journalists.

“It is important that we acknowledge the brave work of the investigative journalist, without whom we wouldn’t know about the horrific abuses of human rights occurring there,” she said.

The US passed the Magnitsky Act in 2012 which was initially designed to sanction Russian officials involved in the prison death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow lawyer investigating a sweeping tax fraud.