Australians are understandably shocked at the trial and sentencing of Peter Greste. Here is an internationally renowned journalist who, by all accounts, appears to have been arrested and sentenced to a lenthy prison term for doing no more than his job (and as part of what looks on the surface to be a dispute between Egypt and Qatar and the latter's flagship network, Al Jazeera).
They may, not unreasonably, ask themselves what the Government can do for those caught up in the vagaries of a foreign legal system. What can Australia do to back the impressive-sounding declaration in its passports that 'The Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia ... requests all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer, an Australian Citizen, to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford him or her every assistance and protection of which he or she may stand in need'?
Consulates and embassies can certainly help source counsel and other advice, and a country can make representations on behalf of its nationals. In the final analysis, however, there is not very much more that states can do to protect their citizens at all, beyond exercising what political and diplomatic leverage they have as a matter of realpolitik.
Despite the globalisation of international law, the international order is still largely based on national sovereignty (as it has been since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648). The price of this is that states are (with a few notable exceptions such as universal jurisdiction for torture or war crimes) unaccountable to the outside world for the workings of their own internal legal systems — however dysfunctional they may seem to foreigners.
We do not need to look to Fatah al Sisi's Egypt to see how this can allow a multitude of injustices to go unpunished — we need only ask our neighbours, the Indonesians.
While much (justified) attention has been given in the media to spying scandals and refugee politics, rather less noticed has been Australia's treatment of its neighbour's fishermen, most of whom ply their trade in small boats and are far from well off.
At least two Indonesians have died while being held without trial on their boats in Darwin harbour. Others have been forcibly taken to the mainland to be in immigration detention (about 1232 in the 2008 financial year) — despite the fact that their 'immigration' was not of their making.
In many cases, the Australian Government