This article is old but since David Hicks is still in Guantanamo I think it’s worth posting. It’s also a fantastic example of the power of the arts.
“In June an open letter to the Prime Minister, signed by 76 of Australia’s top legal minds (including four former Supreme and Federal Court judges), urged Mr Howard to take immediate action on Hicks’ behalf to secure his rights under international law.
He is an Australian citizen and as such it was the Australian Government’s duty to protect his rights; his incarceration was illegal, they argued; and Hicks, whether innocent or guilty, at least deserved a fair trial. The Australian Government’s refusal to act, they said, has profound implications for the nation.
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Even the British Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, whose own government is an active participant in the war on terrorism, condemned the goings-on at Guantanamo, describing its procedures as “unacceptable” and calling for its closure.
To all of this Prime Minister John Howard, speaking on our behalf, responded: “We make up our own minds about these things.”
Theatre director Nigel Jamieson has also made up his mind on certain things. One of them is that what is happening to David Hicks at Guantanamo is unconscionable – whether he is innocent or guilty.
“If he were an axe murderer he would have rights,” Jamieson says. “He would have a lawyer, he’d be free from physical and psychological abuse. David Hicks, as an Australian citizen, has rights. That’s the first thing. But the second thing is that this is a country that defines itself by the belief in things like trial by jury, innocence until proved guilty, the Geneva conventions, the Declaration of Human Rights, those incredibly important documents. We were part of forming and forging these documents.
“These were things we thought incredibly important, the things we thought to be the bedrock of our civilisation and which defined our system,” Jamieson says.
“What troubled me about the whole Hicks thing was that if we were going to accept a system which threw away a lot of those things, got rid of those safeguards, surely we owed it to ourselves and to the country to have a look at what that means.
“Not to have a look, not to have a debate, but just to quietly acquiesce, that really seemed shocking to me.”
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“My imagination is primarily a visual one,” he says, “and when the project was first put to me, I was left with a strong image in my head of this human figure spinning and turning in a void.””
Doing the Guantanamo shuffle – it’s really worth reading the rest of the article.