Haneef

HANEEF: A Question of Character

By JACQUI EWART

Halstead Press, 2009, 223 pages, $28.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Mohamed Haneef, a junior doctor at the Gold Coast’s Southport hospital in Queensland, had no idea that his life was to be shattered when the budget-conscious, Indian-born Haneef lent his SIM card whilst in England in 2006 to Dr. Sabeel Ahmed so his second cousin could use the remaining time. Arrested as a terror suspect, interviewed without a lawyer, wrongfully imprisoned for three weeks, his career disrupted, his reputation trashed, Dr. Haneef felt the full force of a politically-motivated government terrorist scare campaign in 2007.

When Kafeel Ahmed, Sabeel’s brother, drove an explosives-packed jeep into Glasgow airport in that month, Haneef’s old SIM card was initially used as evidence by Scotland Yard to connect Haneef to the terrorist attack. As Jacquie Ewart documents in her book, Haneef: A Question of Character, the reaction of the Australian Government, the Australian Federal Police and the Australian mainstream media was extreme.

The Government was to spend $8 million, deploy nearly 600 police, and hold Haneef for 16 days without charge in the Brisbane watchhouse, then, when eventually released on bail, cancel his visa on bogus ‘character’ grounds and hold him in immigration detention for nine more days in Brisbane’s Wolston Correctional Centre.

At last, the conservative Howard Government had a “real, live terror suspect, right on Queensland’s Gold Coast”, writes Ewart, and they weren’t going to let go a gilt-edged opportunity to test out their new ‘anti-terrorist’ powers and salvage the upcoming election with a Muslim terrorist scare to take the focus off the Prime Minister’s rapidly diminishing popularity.

The Government’s focus survived Haneef being dismissed by British authorities as not being implicated in the terrorist attack. Australia’s domestic spy agency, ASIO, also found no grounds to join in the political stitch-up and thus made itself also irrelevant to the bigger government-painted picture.

The “terror-fuelled storm” whipped up by the Government and its loyal media only began to abate when Haneef’s counsel, Stephen Keim (who had taken on the case pro-bono), released the transcript of Haneef’s police interview in which all suspicions and falsehoods were explained away. Keim was vilified by Attorney-General Ruddock (an “undistinguished lawyer elevated far beyond his ability”) and by Police Commissioner, Mick Keelty, for releasing the transcript but such transcripts are not confidential and the right to publish, notes Geoffrey Robertson in his Preface to Ewart’s book, is a “vital safeguard against abusive secret policing”.

This setback prompted the Government and the AFP to conspire to breathe life into the terrorist-scare by withdrawing Haneef’s immigration visa after bail was granted. Howard’s Immigration Minister, Kevin Andrews, was joined by the Labor Opposition in this “pretty ugly piece of political opportunism” (and was one of the reasons for Keim’s later resignation from the Labor Party, disillusioned by Labor’s acquiescence in the Howard Government’s conduct of the case).

Ewart is aware of the importance of campaigning around civil liberties and she credits groups such as Amnesty International and the Socialist Alliance, and alternative media such as Green Left Weekly, with aiding Haneef’s public relations battle by using ridicule (‘Reckless with a SIM card, arrest Shane Warne’) to expose the legal and political abuses that led to Haneef’s detention.

With the police case unravelling fast, Howard increasingly distanced himself, charges were withdrawn, Haneef was allowed back to India, his visa was reinstated by the Federal Court and was not appealed to the High Court by the new Labor Government in 2008. The police eventually, if reluctantly, dropped their investigation of Haneef. The Rudd Government announced a judicial enquiry, with limited scope and restricted powers, which nevertheless concluded that Haneef should never have been charged.

It was too late, however, for Haneef, who had lost his job and an income that supported five people and who had to spend a year recovering from the trauma of his detention before resuming his career in the United Arab Emirates.

There remain some unresolved secrets of the case. None are to do with Haneef and all are to do with his persecutors – the ‘secret information’ that Minister Andrews claimed for denying Haneef his visa on ‘character’ grounds; the ‘secret security agency’ that operates under the guise of another Commonwealth agency and cooperates closely with the AFP; the thousands of documents that the AFP and the Prime Minister’s Department will not release to Haneef’s lawyers, documents, concludes Ewart, that might well point to political involvement by the Prime Minister in the case. Justice for the ‘big fish’ who cooked up the civil rights crime by the state against Haneef remains to be done.