Labor under pressure over mandatory sentences for terror offences

International law experts have ramped up pressure on Labor for abandoning the party’s decades-long opposition to mandatory minimum sentences, by reporting the government to the UN.

Anthony Albanese. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

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International law experts have ramped up pressure on Labor for abandoning the party’s decades-long opposition to mandatory minimum sentences, by reporting the Albanese government to the UN over its tough new terror laws.

After Labor passed legislation enshrining a six-year minimum jail term for terror offences, UN special rapporteurs Ben Saul and Margaret Satterthwaite wrote to the international body to express their concerns about the human rights implications of criminal penalties becoming “automatic”.

Labor added the provisions as a late amendment to its hate crimes bill shortly before it passed the parliament earlier this month. The provisions also added three year minimum sentences for ­financing terrorism and one year in prison for displaying hate ­symbols.

Amid a rise in anti-Semitic attacks, the Coalition had ramped up pressure on Labor to give into its demands to insert mandatory sentences into the hate crimes bill, which criminalises “threatening force or violence” against targeted groups.

Professor Saul, who is an Australian academic and special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, said mandatory minimum sentences were not “effective” and “sacrificed too many human rights”.

“It’s really unfortunate that we are seeing this kind of race to the bottom to be the toughest on crime, when we know that those kinds of policies are not evidence-based, they’re not likely to be effective, and they don’t comply with human rights,” he told The Australian. The letter, which has been sent to the Australian permanent mission in Geneva, outlined the “deeply” held concerns Professor Saul and Ms Satterthwaite, an American international human rights scholar, have about the measures.

University of Sydney international law expert and barrister Ben Saul.

They also warned the laws would “infringe the right to liberty” by removing due process and proportionality.

“The risk of arbitrariness is heightened because the act imposes a blanket six-year term of imprisonment for a wide spectrum of terrorism offences of very disparate levels of gravity, ranging from the actual commission of a terrorist act to conduct which may (often) be very remote from the realisation of any terrorist violence,” the letter said.

“Including acts that may be minor in the circumstances, such as possessing some document or giving small amounts of money.”

They also cautioned mandatory sentences would deprive courts of the capacity to consider the individual circumstances of a case to ensure that penalties are “necessary, proportionate and reasonable”.

The experts also said there was no evidence mandatory sentences acted as an effective deterrent or addressed the underlying cause of criminality.

“It is a general, cardinal principle of law that criminal responsibility must be determined on an individual basis, and this is compromised if the penalty is automatic and cannot be tailored to fit the crime in the particular circumstances,” they said.

“There is, in any event, no clear empirical evidence that mandatory minimum sentencing deters and reduces crime and could thus constitute necessary restrictions.

“There is also some evidence that it can increase recidivism by detaining individuals for longer periods in prisons, which are ‘learning environments’ for criminality, and by failing to address underlying causes of crime or consider more rehabilitative alternatives to imprisonment which can both reduce crime.”

After the letter has reached the Australian permanent mission it will be passed back to Foreign Affairs in Canberra, with the government having two months to respond.

Labor’s national platform states mandatory sentencing doesn’t reduce crime and often leads to ‘‘unjust outcomes and is often discriminatory in practice’’.