High Court to consider Timor Gap Treaty
By Bernie Brian
DARWIN — According to Darwin-based Queens Counsel, Alastair Wyvill, the High Court is taking the upcoming hearings on the Timor Gap Treaty very seriously. Speaking at a public meeting here on July 27, Wyvill revealed that the three-day hearing (starting on August 9) will involve seven judges. Usually high court hearings involve five judges and last one day.
Wyvill is one the many legal experts supplying their services free to the cause of proving that the treaty has no validity under international law, that Indonesia's annexation of East Timor was an act of international "piracy" and Australia is an accessory to this crime. The case was very important, Wyvill said, because if a favourable decision is handed down, the treaty will be dead and investments in Timor Gap exploration would have "no security".
Wyville told the meeting that there are numerous precedents in international law which support their arguments. In this case, however, it may get down to how willing the High Court judges are to intervene in a politically sensitive issue so soon after Mabo.
Even if the case is lost, international law does not recognise Australian and Indonesian ownership of any of the profits gained from the exploitation of resources in the Timor Gap; this opens up the possibility of future claims for compensation from East Timor.
Robert Wesley-Smith who recently attended the Asia Pacific Conference on East Timor in Manila, also spoke. He said that Indonesia had made a serious error in trying to bully the Philippines government to ban the conference. It immediately became the lead story, for three weeks, in most of the national newspapers and if many Filipinos had not heard of East Timor before the conference, they certainly knew of it afterwards.
Some of the conference's highlights for Wesley-Smith included the statement from jailed Timorese leader Xanana Gusmao and the protection provided by ordinary Filipino people to foreign delegates when the Philippines government attempted to ban them from attending.
Dr Andrew McNaughton, recently returned from East Timor, addressed the public meeting. He said he left East Timor with the firm belief that the people are "more resolved than ever to win their freedom and independence". He said recent attempts by the occupying army to step up their harassment of the Catholic Church has caused a "major outpouring of emotion" such as the recent clash of students with 2000 riot police at the University of East Timor on July 14.
The meeting was also informed that the national conference of the Electrical, Electronic, Plumbing and Allied Workers Union of Australia (EPU) had passed a unanimous decision to support Cardinal Clancy's call for the Keating government to confront the human rights situation in East Timor.
A recently retired WA EPU official told the meeting that the union had also called on the federal government to reverse its support for the Indonesian occupation of East Timor and to let the East Timorese people decide their future by way of a referendum. The union is submitting this resolution to the ALP National Conference and to the ACTU.
Finally the meeting discussed future activities to support the people of East Timor including a campaign to boycott all companies involved in the Timor Gap exploration and a campaign to stop Indonesia's involvement in Kangaroo '95 military exercises.