Australia’s top lawyers have expressed concerns with the at a meeting of the Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security.
The government's proposed bill will lower the threshold for revoking Australian citizenship of people convicted of terrorism offences, regardless of the severity of the sentence.
At today's Parliamentary Committee hearing, Australia's top legal experts expressed their opposition to the government's new citizenship-stripping bill.
Human Rights Commissioner Edward Santow says that while the Commission supports robust laws to keep the community from threats of terrorism, he held 'grave concerns' in relation to a number of key aspects of the bill.
Currently, the law requires that a person convicted of a terrorism offence could only be stripped of their citizenship when they have been sentenced to at least six years in prison, or to periods that total at least six years.
Edward Santow, a Human Rights Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission says the government's proposal to remove this requirement is a disproportionate response.
“We consider a person's citizenship should be stripped only in exceptional circumstances where the gravest criminal conduct also repudiates the person's allegiance to Australia. We say the best measure of the gravity of an offence is the length of sentence imposed by a court, and that's why the law should continue to set a minimum length of sentence before a person's citizenship can be removed,” Mr Santow said.
Mr Santow also highlighted the Commission's concern that lowering the threshold for determining whether an Australian is also a citizen of another country will heighten risk that they could become potentially stateless.
This concern was also shared by Arthur Moses, the president of the Law Council of Australia.
“As the recent history demonstrates, both in the cases of the citizenship involving members of this parliament and the Prakash case, the difficulties in determining actual present citizenship are complex enough, the idea that this legislation would involve predictions about the future ability of someone to obtain citizenship from a foreign country would obviously be a fraught decision, and for that reason the law council does not support that proposed change,” Mr Moses said.
But Linda Geddes from the Department of Home Affairs dismissed accusations the legislation is too heavy-handed and unconstitutional, arguing it is necessary to protect the community.
"Removing the requirement for a six-year sentence recognises that there may be individuals in this growing cohort of convicted terrorist offenders that continue to pose a risk to the community upon release regardless of the sentence length. The changes in the bill if passed may capture a further 18 individuals who have committed relevant terrorist offences, the minister must still have regard to a range of matters in determining whether it is the public interest for a person's Australian citizenship to cease, this includes the severity of their conduct, the degree of threat posed to the public and their connection to their country of second citizenship. Australia has a mature and robust counter terrorism framework that affords a high level of protection to the Australian community but we cannot afford to be complacent,” Linda Geddes said.
