Leavides Domingo-Cabarrubias | 5 September 2022

Australia has a clear position to oppose the death penalty in all circumstances for all people. In its 2018 Strategy for Abolition of the Death Penalty, the government expressed a strong commitment to support the worldwide abolition of the death penalty. However, Australia’s stance on the death penalty has not always been clear, and many factors have contributed to the strengthening of its position.

Melbourne-based barrister Julian P McMahon, who has spent years fighting for clients on death row, examines the recent developments in anti–death penalty advocacy in Australia. In his article Anti–Death Penalty Advocacy: A Lawyer’s View from Australia,  McMahon reviews the executions of Australians and the Australian responses over the past two decades. Informed by his experience of working with local legal team in death penalty cases in Singapore and Indonesia, McMahon provides a personal account of the circumstances surrounding the trial and eventual executions of Van Tuong Nguyen, who was hanged in Singapore in December 2005, and Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, who were executed in Indonesia in April 2015. He describes the relentless efforts made in various fronts to save the lives of Van, and later Chan and Sukumaran; the then growing support for the convicts;  and the gradual shift in the Australian sentiment from treating the convicts as ‘Asian drug dealers’, to the ‘open acceptance that they were Australians and that their fellow Australians would stand up for these young men who, having turned their lives around within prison, deserved to be punished but not executed’.

The article notes that the April 2015 executions ‘were a pivotal turning point in the story of the death penalty in Australia’. McMahon details the work of the legal team assembled in Australia to assist the local lawyers representing Chan and Sukumaran, as well as that of various groups and individuals working together to stay the executions, in the development of Australia’s anti-death penalty position.

Over the years, the team did an enormous amount of legal work, as well as acting as liaison between all those involved—the clients, their families, the Indonesian lawyers, DFAT, academics, Australian politicians, supporters offering practical help, interested Australians and others from around the world, and the media. The interplay between all those groups changed how Australia understood the death penalty.

Chan and Sukumaran gained widespread support from various sectors within Australia, including politicians from across the political spectrum, media personalities, artists, celebrities, grassroots and local communities. The  trial and impending executions of Chan and Sukumaran galvanised various forces in Australia to offer support and organise initiatives such as vigils, concerts, and a Petition for Mercy addressed to the Indonesian President, which obtained over 250,000 signatures. According to McMahon, the entire movement had a clear message: that ‘Executions had become unacceptable to Australia as a community and as a nation’.

Following efforts to save Chan and Sukumaran, the article highlights the Australian government’s initiatives, to continuously advance its position on the abolition of death penalty worldwide. In 2016, after an extensive inquiry into the death penalty that involved taking oral and written submissions from a wide range of groups and individuals, the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade (JSCFADT) tabled its report, A World Without the Death Penalty: Australia’s Advocacy for the Abolition of the Death Penalty. The Report stresses Australia’s role as a supporter of abolition and as ‘an active advocate on the world stage’. Based on evidence gathered during the inquiry, the Report provides 13 recommendations that, according to McMahon, were far-reaching, and ‘steered Australia onto a path of serious ongoing commitment to abolition by principled and targeted action’. The Report recommended the development of a ‘whole-of-government strategy’ for abolition of the death penalty. Pursuant to this, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) developed the 2018 Strategy for Abolition of the Death Penalty, mentioned above, which sets out Australia’s policy on the death penalty and outlines the government’s overarching approach to pursuing global abolition of the death penalty.

The article provides a rare insight into McMahon’s own personal experiences as a key player in the various events that influenced the development of Australia’s anti-death penalty advocacy, as well as on the many fronts where the fight for abolition is still being fought. Recognising that the anti-death penalty advocacy ‘is one human rights fight among many’, he concludes:

While there is no guarantee that human rights will improve, or that executions and state-sanctioned brutality will not become more common, the story of the death penalty in Australia shows that struggles of this kind can be won. We cannot do everything—but what we can do, that much at least we should do.

Leavides Domingo-Cabarrubias is a Fellow at Eleos Justice and a PhD Candidate at Monash Faculty of Law.

This blog summarises the article 'Anti–Death Penalty Advocacy: A Lawyer’s View from Australia' by Julian McMahon, published as part of a special issue on ‘Death Penalty Politics: the fragility of abolition in Asia and the Pacific’ (eds. Mark Finnane, Mai Sato and Susan Trevaskes) in the International Journal of Crime, Justice and Social Democracy.