The prosecution of David McBride for exposing Australian war crime allegations is an outrageous injustice | Kieran Pender and Kobra Moradi
The attorney general must discontinue the case against the former military lawyer and fix federal whistleblowing law
Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast
After more than a decade of secrecy and silence surrounding the conduct of Australian forces in Afghanistan, in November 2020 the Brereton report shone a damning spotlight on allegations of horrific war crimes. Credible evidence pointed to Australian forces unlawfully killing 39 Afghan non-combatants, including innocent civilians. In exhaustive and sometimes redacted detail, the inquiry chronicled incident after incident of unthinkable wrongdoing – including one described as “possibly the most disgraceful episode in Australia’s military history”.
It took more than a decade for these alleged war crimes to come to light due to a pervasive culture of silence and cover-ups, including falsified reports and the planting of weapons on dead bodies. Operational reporting was “routinely embellished, and sometimes outright fabricated”, Brereton found.
Kieran Pender is a senior lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre. Kobra Moradi is a lawyer at the Australian Centre for International Justice, which has published information about Australia’s alleged war crimes in Afghanistan in Pashto, Dari and English
Law (Australia) | The Guardian
Recent Comments