Australia’s Guantanamo Bay shame

David Hicks, an Australian resident, has had to turn to his birth country Britain to secure freedom from Guantanamo. The Howard government in Australia has consistently refused to intervene on his behalf, backing the Bush detention policy all the way.

Lawyers for Hick have successfully applied for his rightful UK citizenship, in the face of Australian intransigence. But while Britain has intervened for all other nationals they are not in any rush to extend their support to the hapless Hicks.

British lawyers for Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks will today ask the High Court to order the British Government to stop thwarting his bid to gain British citizenship and arrange for him to swear the oath of allegiance immediately.

Lawyer Stephen Grosz said he was taking court action because the Government had said it would consider using the new Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act to deprive Hicks of British citizenship.

He said the Government had had six months to make arrangements to register Hicks as a British citizen and had not done so.

Meanwhile, several Australian Coalition backbenchers with deep concerns for Hicks are pushing for him to be brought to trial immediately. Hicks is due to face a US military tribunal on terrorism charges.

Liberal MP Danna Vale said she was "disturbed" by legal delays in Hicks' case when he had been incarcerated since 2001 in the US military prison where three detainees committed suicide on Friday. Hicks' lawyer said he was in a fragile state.

Perhaps more than any, Hicks represents the stupidity and travesty that is Guantanamo Bay. Holding him in isolation has become little more than an attempt by the coalition partners to keep a lid on a highly embarrassing episode.

They have exposed the fruitless idiocy of the whole terrorist incarceration program, by netting and holding dumb adventurers like Hicks. His release would obviously expose truths which the coalition governments would prefer to cover up.

At the very least authorities must give Hick an open and fair trial, not the secret military hearing they have planned. Better still, just let the poor bastard walk, the Guantanamo Bay damage has been done now, anyway.