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AUSTRALIA

Julie Bishop's opportunity to press PNG on death penalty

  • 16 September 2013

Papua New Guinea's prime minister Peter O'Neill has declared his resolve to see the death penalty handed to the murderers of two porters killed during last Tuesday's attack on a group of Australian and New Zealand trekkers. 

'These are appalling crimes, and they attract the death penalty under laws passed by the parliament since the last election,' he said. 'At a time when we are seeking to increase tourism these crimes are an obvious setback — but we must not let them deter tourists visiting PNG, and our own people helping visitors in their travels.'

In May, PNG passed legislation to promote its use of the death penalty, following a number of high-profile and violent crimes such as rape, robbery and sorcery-related murder. Capital punishment had never been outlawed but there have been no executions since 1954, when PNG was administered by Australia.

Soon after the legislation went through parliament, then Australian foreign minister Bob Carr voiced our opposition to capital punishment during a visit to Port Moresby: 'I said to foreign minister Pato, Australia is opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances and we never cease to make that clear.'

In the wake of O'Neill's vow to make the attackers face the death penalty for their crimes against the trekking party that included Australian nationals, Australia's incoming foreign minister Julie Bishop needs to remind PNG that Australia remains opposed to the death penalty, and that PNG will curry no favour with Australia by executing criminals who harmed Australians. The involvement of the Australians as victims gives us the opportunity to make a representation without necessarily interfering in the sovereign affairs of another nation.

O'Neill is behaving brazenly when he makes it clear that, in seeking the death penalty, he is more driven by a desire to protect the country's tourism industry than seeing justice administered for its own sake. In a statement that eerily echoes the current state sponsored blood bath in Syria, PNG's Catholic bishops criticised the capital punishment legislation 'that draws Papua New Guinea closer to the point of legally killing its own citizens'.

In a statement released in May and signed by Archbishop Douglas Young of Mt Hagen, they were particularly worried that the enacting of the capital punishment legislation looked like a covert exercise of executive authority that lacked accountability:

It seems that the legislation was passed 'on the voices' thereby making it difficult for many voters to know the actual
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