‘Living through hell’: Coalition pledge to rescue jailed Australians

A new high-level position of special envoy for hostage affairs would be created if the Coalition wins the May 3 election to advocate for Australians jailed overseas on flimsy or politically motivated charges.

The pledge to take more assertive action to tackle “hostage diplomacy” has been welcomed by Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian academic who was held and imprisoned in Iran from 2018 to 2020 after being falsely charged with espionage.

Cheng Lei, Kylie Moore-Gilbert and Sean Turnell were all detained overseas.Credit: DFAT, Scott McNaughton, Alex Ellinghausen

She and other former detainees believe the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s preference for “quiet diplomacy” can be overly cautious and that raising the profile of Australians detained overseas could, in certain circumstances, help secure their release.

“Thankfully, following the determined efforts of successive governments, most, like Dr Kylie-Moore-Gilbert, Cheng Lei, and Professor Sean Turnell have been returned home to Australia from Iran, China, and Myanmar, respectively,” opposition foreign affairs spokesman David Coleman said.

“However, their release came only after years of having to endure circumstances which are difficult for anyone to comprehend, with little or no access to health care, contact with loved ones, lawyers and in some cases, no access to Australian officials.”

Coleman said several Australians were still trapped in terrible conditions in overseas prisons, including engineer Robert Pether, who has been detained in Iraq for four years, and Gordon Ng, who is detained in Hong Kong under strict national security laws.

Chinese-Australian academic and blogger Yang Hengjun has also been detained in China since 2019 and sentenced to a suspended death penalty, he added.

The Coalition will immediately move to establish the position if elected and would appoint a senior, respected figure to the role. They would report directly to the foreign minister, bypassing DFAT’s bureaucratic structure.

The United States has had a special presidential envoy for hostage affairs since 2015 and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy has announced plans to appoint an envoy to help secure the release of Britons detained abroad.

Moore-Gilbert, who leads the Australian Wrongful and Arbitrary Detention Alliance, said the role “would finally see cases of wrongfully detained Australians promptly and proactively identified, with steps taken beyond the provision of consular assistance, toward securing their release”.

She said her group – which includes Sean Turnell and Cheng Lei – was thrilled that the Coalition had accepted the recommendations of a Senate inquiry into this issue, released late last year.

“For every public case of an Aussie languishing behind bars in a foreign prison or as the captive of a non-state actor, there is another whose plight has not been reported on,” said Moore-Gilbert, who spent 804 days in an Iranian jail before being released in a prisoner swap deal.

“As a country, we need to step up to better support our fellow citizens and their families who are quite simply living through hell.”

Moore-Gilbert last year said she found it absurd that DFAT officials told the Senate inquiry that “there were no cases that it would currently give the label of ‘arbitrary detention’” and “it was not aware of any cases in the past of Australian citizens being arrested and wrongly detained specifically for diplomatic leverage”.

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has ruled that Pether, who was lured to Iraq and used as a hostage in a commercial dispute between his employer and the Iraqi Central Bank, has been arbitrarily detained.

Moore-Gilbert has said she believes DFAT has a “blanket approach” of quiet diplomacy and was against making her case public.

”The danger in trying to shut down the family if they want to go public unless there’s a really good and explicit reason, is that they’ll go public anyway, but they’ll kind of go rogue and not do it in consultation with government and could undermine negotiations or other interests at play they might not be aware of,” Moore-Gilbert said.

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