Don’t shut down families of Aussies in trouble overseas, high-profile former prisoners warn

High-profile former prisoners including Kylie Moore-Gilbert, Cheng Lei and Sean Turnell are pushing for a rethink of the government’s insistence on secrecy when negotiating the freedom of wrongfully held Australians, warning it has forced some families to “go rogue” to raise awareness.

The three are founding members of the Australian Wrongful and Arbitrary Detention Alliance, which has successfully lobbied for a Senate inquiry into the way the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade manages cases of citizens wrongfully held in government prisons or as hostages.

Cheng Lei (left), Kylie Moore-Gilbert and Sean Turnell.Credit: DFAT, Scott McNaughton, Alex Ellinghausen

Academic Moore-Gilbert was detained in Iran for 804 days on spying charges, while Australian-Chinese journalist Cheng was freed after three years’ detention in China on national security charges, and economist Turnell was charged with breaching Myanmar’s secrets laws and imprisoned for 650 days.

During Moore-Gilbert’s time in Iran, she found the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade had 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, the alliance’s director, said in an interview.

“There are plenty of examples of where that’s happened and not keeping the family onside can sometimes just push them to do and say things publicly that might undermine their cause.”

The Senate inquiry will investigate how Australia can increase transparency and public awareness of the regimes that engage in “hostage diplomacy”, the current management of wrongful detention by the department, and communications with families and detainees.

Moore-Gilbert suggested Australia needed a US-style standalone office to deal with overseas detention issues.

“We don’t have any one individual responsible within Australia, in DFAT or another department. We don’t even have a definition of who is wrongfully detained and who isn’t, or any criteria that they could apply to assess,” Moore-Gilbert said.

“They’ve got thousands of cases of Australians detained abroad, thrown in prison for whatever reason, they don’t have any criteria that they apply to them to determine if these people are wrongfully detained … people fall between the cracks.”

The system for Australians arrested or jailed overseas is primarily operated by consular services, which is part of DFAT. Consular officials are bound by a charter to support detained Australian citizens and give them advice and support if they have been arrested.

Moore-Gilbert was released in November 2020. Four years later, she is in New York on a Churchill Fellowship to research how other countries manage cases of wrongfully detained citizens.

“[The United States] has created a standalone office outside of the consular service, with an ambassadorial-level leadership role reporting to the secretary of state – the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs it’s called,” she said.

“They run the whole thing from beginning to end, including the repatriation and rehoming of the person after they come home but also the whole negotiation for the person, the extraction from the country, everything they do … [is] sort of a one-stop shop and they’re responsible and accountable.”

Labor MP Peter Khalil, who chairs the powerful joint parliamentary committee on intelligence and security, hopes the inquiry can increase DFAT’s success in bringing Australians home.

“We’ve had great success in getting Sean [Turnell] out and Cheng Lei out, and [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange was the other obvious example,” he said.

“All of this stuff, we’ve had good success. I think understanding the system structures in place, the resourcing, and working together with like-minded countries will be even more beneficial, increasing our probability of success and also mitigating and just deterring countries and state-based actors or others from arbitrarily detaining people in this way.”

The inquiry will be chaired by Liberal senator Claire Chandler, who says the system needs to be more transparent.

The inquiry is currently receiving submissions and will report to the foreign affairs, defence and trade references committee by November 28.

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