Some will go free: price of avoiding death row: Bob Myers

Ensuring that Australian drugs traffickers did not end up on death row could inevitably result in some escaping capture, says a Brisbane lawyer.

Ensuring Australian drug traffickers did not end up on death row would result in some escaping capture, says the Brisbane lawyer who told the Australian Federal Police about one of the Bali Nine.

Bob Myers, who informed the AFP about Scott Rush after being asked by his father to act before the youth left for Indonesia, said this was the trade-off for preserving lives.

Mr Myers said the AFP’s statement yesterday that it could not guarantee it would not act differently in a similar situation in future was not supported by its recent actions.

“Since 2009, they have acted completely contrary to the way they acted in 2005,’’ he said.

“I believe they would never do the same thing again and I believe that privately they do appreciate how badly they acted in 2005.”

He said that by intervening to prevent the Australians travelling, the AFP would have prevented the drug operation going ahead and would have been able to arrest almost all members of the group.

“You’re not going to get everyone at once, but getting eight of the nine is a good result. They have acted ever so carefully since 2009,” Mr Myers said.

“We now know what the AFP justification was, but it was not sufficient. You are not entitled to sacrifice a life in those circumstances. They have learnt their lesson — I don’t believe the AFP will ever act in that way again.”

Mr Myers said he had tried to persuade Tony Abbott to adopt a different strategy to save the lives of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. He believed the better course would have been to try to persuade Indonesia the AFP had made a mistake which needed to be corrected by letting the two men live.

AFP Commissioner Andrew Colvin said yesterday: “I wish I could assure you that this scenario could never happen again, but I cannot.”

He said in the past three years the AFP had refused to exchange information in 15 cases.

However, Australian lawyer Robert Welfare, part of Rush’s legal team that in 2011 managed to get the Brisbane courier’s death sentence commuted to life imprisonment, said nothing had changed in terms of AFP policy.

He branded the AFP’s response “just crocodile tears’’.

“It’s a matter that needs to be looked at by the Australian parliament,’’ he said.

“Should the discretion to share information with countries that have the death penalty be left to the AFP or, as I’ve suggested earlier, should the attorney-general be involved before the information is shared?

“If I was a parent I would be reticent to share information with the AFP.

“They are not going to apologise to Chan or Sukumaran’s families or the others on life sentences. Life means life over there. It’s not much of a life.”