In 1994, a government decided that one of its citizens who had gone abroad to fight some years earlier had become such a menace that he needed to be stripped of his citizenship, leaving him to wander the world in search of sympathisers. Instead of becoming someone else's problem, he became the whole world's problem.
His name was Osama Bin Laden.
Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden became the world's problem.Credit: AP
This week an Australian citizen, Mohammed Noor Masri, spoke to The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, making a plea for Canberra to repatriate him and his family. While Masri is unlikely to prove as pivotal a figure as Bin Laden, he and hundreds of others captured in the fall of the so-called Islamic State raise many of the same questions.
By his own admission, Masri has committed a crime, having travelled to the IS-held region of Syria around Raqqa in 2015, some months after it was made a "declared area" under Australian law. Whether this was in fact the full extent of his offending, as he claims, is a matter for a court to determine. But where?
The government has already made it clear that, at least in the near term, it would rather not answer that question with the word "Australia". A spokesman for Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said Canberra "is determined to deal with these people as far from our shores as possible and ensure that any who do return do so with forewarning". To this end, it has sought powers to ban foreign fighters – even if they are minors – from returning, despite a warning from the Law Council that the proposed measures are at odds with our legal precedent and our commitments under international law, and it has also waded into an unedifying diplomatic mess in its attempts to prevent Neil Prakash from facing an Australian court.
With our major allies advocating and resisting repatriation, what are the alternatives?
Those who have argued that IS offenders should be tried in or near the location where those crimes they stand accused of were committed have to reckon with placing judicial responsibility for hundreds or thousands of cases on states that are either recovering from crisis (Iraq), ruled by a dictator whose human rights abuses are widely acknowledged (Syria) or where the independence of the judiciary is highly questionable (Turkey). Many of the IS captives are held by Kurdish forces who represent a putative state and whose institutions are barely formed.
Others have suggested a role for the International Criminal Court, which was created to address crimes against humanity of the type routinely committed by IS and its cadres. Australia is a signatory to the Rome Statute that established the court, and if it decided that it was not going to try its citizens it could in theory refer them to the ICC. However this would also set a troubling precedent. The ICC was meant to deal with situations where a nation's justice system proved inadequate; is that where we are with regard to terrorism?
There are certainly real challenges in dealing with the men, women and children who have participated in and emerged from IS's reign of terror, just as there are with how to incarcerate those citizens who conduct terrorist offences on our soil. But as a spokesman for Syria's main Kurdish militia told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald recently, "democracy has a price and we all had to pay ... We are sure your justice system can do good." If we are serious about understanding and combating this brand of extremism, we need to step up to that task.