British Citizenship Tussle
The Sunday Age
Sunday March 25, 2007
A BIZARRE legal twist has left David Hicks "shadow-boxing" the British Government in his fight for British citizenship, according to the lawyer leading his appeal in London.
Hicks' British lawyers are pressing on with the citizenship appeal as he prepares to plead not guilty to a charge of providing material support for terrorism in Cuba tomorrow. But they cannot be present for half of the appeal, set for May, because they are forbidden from viewing secret evidence used by Home Secretary John Reid to strip him of his British citizenship last July. Instead, security-cleared "special advocates" will act on Hicks' behalf in closed sessions at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission in London. They cannot communicate with Hicks or his appointed lawyers about the evidence being used against him by the Home Office. "This is a bizarre system whereby the special advocates have seen the classified information . . . but we're in a position of shadow boxing," the lawyer leading Hicks' appeal, Stephen Grosz, said. "Once they go behind the curtain . . . they can't say anything to us."Hicks, whose mother is British, has been fighting for citizenship since 2005 because Britain, unlike Australia, has secured the release of nine of its citizens from the United States military detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on the grounds that the military commissions do not meet international legal standards.In the open sessions of the appeal, Hicks' lawyers will argue that the publicly available evidence that Mr Reid relied on to revoke Hicks' citizenship was extracted after Hicks was raped and tortured by US soldiers. The evidence contains alleged statements made by Hicks in 2003 to officers from the British intelligence agency MI5, in which he said he had trained with terrorists in Kashmir and Afghanistan. Mr Grosz said the statements were inadmissible because they breach the United Nations Convention against Torture, to which Britain is a signatory.If the commission supports this argument and refuses to allow the admissions, Hicks' appeal will be determined in the closed sessions. His representation will be wholly dependent on the special advocates. Concerns have been raised in a hearing by a British parliamentary select committee, the Joint Committee on Human Rights, about the role of special advocates. Witnesses said that special advocates cannot provide a full and fair response to evidence in closed sessions because the information they receive is not disclosed and responded to by the person it directly concerns - in this case David Hicks. "It would leave us in the very bizarre position where we don't know what closed evidence the Home Secretary is relying on, even though some may be inadmissible for the same reason as the open case," Mr Grosz said.
© 2007 The Sunday Age