Dr THEOPHANOUS (11:54 AM) —It is my pleasure to speak on the War Crimes Amendment Bill 1999 , and I support the legislation. However, I have to say this legislation is long overdue because it is at least seven years since most of the Iron Curtain countries gained their independence and yet we are only just acting on this matter now. It has been far too slow in coming.

Both sides of the House are, I think, open to criticism in relation to this matter. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry is correct in saying that the whole episode of war criminals from the Second World War in relation to Australia—and the approach of all governments—is a very sorry story. The fact is that, during that period after the war, a number of Nazis, fascists and people of very dubious background were allowed into Australia. When I consider the sorts of checks we make now on people who have legitimate reasons to come to Australia, as compared with what we did then with regard to some people whose background and motivation were amazing, I think this matter needed to be examined.

I have been around for a few years. In 1987, thinking that we would be doing something, I supported the bill which set up the commission. By 1992, when there was not a single successful prosecution, those of us who took an interest in the matter were appalled. Not only had it cost the nation several million dollars but, as the honourable member for Denison has now pointed out in relation to this bill, we were frustrated by certain other factors. One was that in every case, rather than dealing with this matter in cooperation with other countries, we thought we would simply deal with it by trying people, or thinking about trying people, under Australian law with Australian practice. They would then have to pass the stricter criteria that are at present in our system.

That would have been okay if our nation and certain sections of our bureaucracy had not covered up the fact that, when these characters came to Australia at that time, some of them knew of their background. Why has there not been an inquiry into this matter? We have all sorts of parliamentary and other inquiries but we have never had an inquiry into this very serious issue—the cover-up of war criminals who came to Australia after the Second World War. Yes, we had a War Crimes Tribunal established, but its business was to find individuals, not to look into the question of what actually happened in the Australian processes that allowed these people to come during that period. This is very serious: I am not sure that we have learnt from our history.

I take this opportunity to say that I hope the parliament at some stage looks into this matter, looking into the role of our intelligence agencies, our immigration department and other bureaucracies that were involved in covering up the fact that some of these people who came out here had been directly responsible for the killing of a large number of innocent people, including Jewish people.

I now turn to the question of what happened when we did form the War Crimes Tribunal and the sorry tale from 1987 to 1992—we never got a single conviction. We have been criticised in international circles about this. I remember that, at the time they wound it up, we were told that we had done our best and we had gone around trying to find information. In the case of the one person they managed to actually get before a court, it did not proceed in the end because they claimed that the information was not sufficiently powerful in relation to our judicial system.

One wonders whether it would not have been better to start up an investigation into what actually happened in terms of the total process rather than set up a narrow tribunal that looked into the prosecution of individuals. Why were all those people who came here—they may since have died or there may not be sufficient evidence of all their misbehaviour—allowed into this country? Why were they not checked? Who covered up for them? We never investigated that.

We are now being told by the minister in her second reading speech that the reason for this amendment is that things have changed in Europe, and that some of the countries that were behind the Iron Curtain are now part of the European family and we therefore needed to make some extradition treaties with them. But there is a problem: we have suddenly discovered that the criterion called the prima facie case that we have in the legislation under section 22 does not apply to all countries. Not all countries have a similar criterion. Why we suddenly discovered this after all these years is an interesting question.

As the honourable member for Blair said earlier, even if we formed these extradition agreements with Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and several other countries in the former Soviet Union and perhaps even countries in the former Yugoslavia, because they have a different system of dealing with this—that is, a civil code system instead of the same criminal code system of the kind that we have—we still would not be able to get the extraditions going. That is why we want to get rid of section 22. I agree with that; the only thing is that we should have done it years ago. Many of the people who have been guilty of these crimes have now passed away or they are very old, and the possibility of putting together evidence, even under the civil code system, becomes much more difficult.

Having said all that, I think we should now actively take advantage of the passing of this legislation and say that Australia is ready to cooperate with these countries in cases like this. We should, firstly, speedily ensure that we have extradition agreements and, secondly, where there are requests from these countries, deal with them under the civil code system of that particular country so that people can be extradited and dealt with for the things that they have done.

I said earlier that maybe we have not completely learned the lesson of that previous experience. I would be interested to know whether the War Crimes Amendment Bill or the War Crimes Act as it stands will actually be applicable to the crimes against humanity issues that have arisen in relation to a number of places. I am referring particularly to former Yugoslavia. Will this legislation allow us to carry out extraditions against people who may have been involved in crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia? Will this legislation ensure that people who may have come from the former Yugoslavia who may be guilty of crimes against humanity are covered by the amended War Crimes Act? I would be interested in the minister's response to this issue.

The terminology has changed in international forums from `war crimes' to `crimes against humanity'. This is important because of what happens in internal civil war type situations. In situations where there are ethnic conflicts within a particular country, there is no formal declaration of war but there are crimes against humanity. Will this amended legislation be able to deal with that sort of issue? If not, I would suggest that we have missed an opportunity to actually get Australia involved in an international effort in relation to these matters.

We have had a number of sensational incidents in relation to this term `crimes against humanity', the most famous being the Pinochet case in Britain, where Spain requested the extradition of the former president and dictator Mr Pinochet for crimes against humanity committed while he was president of his country.

Let us assume that we had a Pinochet type personality here in Australia and a country requested the extradition of that person. Would this legislation, as amended, cover that sort of incident? Would it cover that type of case? If not, why not? If we have amended legislation, why haven't we taken account of this matter in order to deal with that sort of contingency? And you do not have to be a president. You can be a significant player who has been responsible for crimes against humanity in one of these situations—in a civil war, in an ethnic conflict or, as in the Pinochet case, where the crime is against one's own people.

I would be interested to find out whether the amended legislation is going to cover these situations. If not, I would like to say that I am pretty disappointed that it does not and that there ought to have been further amendments to this legislation to deal with that sort of issue. If the intention of this legislation is to overcome bottlenecks in relation to the past, in relation to 30 or 40 years ago, we should also have learnt from the hard lessons of that time and be ready to deal with more contemporary cases.

We are talking now about dealing with crimes against humanity in relation to East Timor. We have made quite a bit of fuss about that, and of course I agree that we ought to be pursuing it. But what about our own legislation? For example, what if somebody from Indonesia manages to become a permanent Australian resident or citizen and it is discovered that that person was involved in East Timor human rights abuses? Would that be covered under this legislation?

I think it is very important that we confront these issues. We do not want to be left with the following comment made by the Vice-President of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry at the end of the Australian process when he said:

Now we have the benefit of 10 years to look at the legislation that was adopted—

that was the 1989 amendments to the War Crimes Act—

we can see that it failed. It not only failed to deal with that one situation, it failed to deal with the other cases.

What is left is a situation where the information, the allegations, the research is all out there and there's still more that can be conceivably done if the government was willing to devote the resources.

Perhaps that point ought to be taken on board as well. Perhaps we have not devoted sufficient resources in the right way when dealing with this issue.

As we move towards the new millennium and we look at casting off some of the worst aspects of our history, one of the worst things in our history has been the fact that war criminals were able to come to Australia and survive here when they had done awful things and that, by the time we got around to doing something about it, many of them had either passed away or the evidence had disappeared. We have not even seriously investigated why all of that happened.

When we are facing up to the future, when we have seen the situations that have occurred in various places around the world, especially in the former Yugoslavia, and we know that there may be people here who have been involved in some of these crimes, let us make sure that we have the weapons, that we have the legislation and that we have the political will to pursue any such people so that we do not repeat the episode which occurred after the Second World War in relation to the Nazis. I support the legislation.