criminal law: October 2007 Archives

The farce that is the Keystone Cops Australian Federal Police's handling of the Haneef matter just won't go away, and it gets worse every time I look at it.  AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty, who was previously vocal in defending the AFP's prosecution of Haneef, and equally vocal in attacking Haneef's lawyers for pointing out the gaping flaws in the AFP's case against him, has now said that he knew the case was weak.

Tony Morris QC has called for Keelty to be sacked, and I agree with him whole-heartedly.  From the news.com.au article:

"At the time, he was very vocal in the press, castigating Haneef's lawyers for disclosing the weaknesses in the prosecution case," Mr Morris said. "Now he admits that he was conscious of those weaknesses all along, and stood by and did nothing when an inaccurate version of the facts was inadvertently presented to the court.

"On his own admission, as the chief law enforcement officer for the commonwealth, he was willing to allow a miscarriage of justice to proceed without taking any step to interfere - and then attacked Haneef's lawyers for their efforts to prevent that miscarriage."

Keelty should have had the balls to quit when it was revealed that the prosecution had given completely false information to the court for the purpose of justifying Haneef's continued detention.  I don't know what Keelty was thinking when he made his most recent admissions -- maybe he thinks it's better to be thought to be a compliant stooge of the commonwealth's 'war against terror', than to be thought ignorant or incompetent.

The fact that Keelty hasn't been sacked over the Haneef debacle is symptomatic of the reprehensible and irresponsible government we've come to enjoy under Howard's watch.  Thankfully the smart money is on that watch ending in about a month's time.  Hopefully Rudd will give Keelty the arse, but I wouldn't put money on it.

EFA has published the submission that we made to the Commonwealth Attorney-General's Department's RFC on a draft of the Copyright Infringement Notice Scheme Guidelines.  Kim Weatherall made an excellent submission, which covers the big picture issues very well - so EFA kept ours mainly on the EFA-type issues.