THE HAGUE (Global Voices / Sydney Morning Herald / La'o Hamutuk): The government of Timor-Leste has won an International Court of Justice case against Australian state spies.
The Hague court yesterday ordered the Australian government and intelligence agencies ordered to stop spying on the government of Timor-Leste and its legal advisers.
The case was brought after the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) raided the Canberra office of Bernard Collaery in December 2013.
Collaery is the Australian attorney who is representing Timor-Leste in its dispute with Australia over the distribution of profit from the Greater Sunrise oil and gas field, worth 40 billion US dollars.
Global Voices reported that on the same day of last year's raid, ASIO seized the passport of an alleged Australian whistleblower, a former employee of the ASIS (Australian Secret Service) involved in intelligence activities in East Timor, who would be willing to testify in court about the installation of recording devices in the offices of the Timorese prime minister during treaty negotiations.
This former spy for the Australian government, whose identity was not revealed, was the key witness for East Timor in court. The Australian action aimed to prevent his travel to the Netherlands in order to be present in court.
The Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea (CMATS) treaty stipulated that revenue from the field should be divided equally between the two countries until 2056, even though the field is 400 km closer to the Timor-Leste coastline. But the government of Timor-Leste has applied to the Hague to overturn the treaty, saying it was negotiated in bad faith because Australia bugged Timor-Leste's Prime Minister's meeting room during the negotiations.
That case will be heard over the next year.
The latest ICJ ruling also prohibits Australia from using any of the documents it seized in the raid in the upcoming arbitration. The Australian government has also been barred from meddling with Timor-Leste's legal advisers.
However, it stopped short of agreeing to Timor-Leste's request to have the stolen documents returned to it.
The Sydney Morning Herald's Tom Allard says this is the first time that the court has imposed restrictions on the spy agencies of one of the so-called ''five eyes'' intelligence community - US, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia - and comes at a time about widespread international concern about over-reach by Western intelligence agencies".
Meanwhile, the government Timor-Leste issued Australia with this set of demands last December:
1. Stop stealing and occupying the Timor Sea, but show your goodwill as a large nation which follows democratic principles to accept a maritime boundary which follows international law principles.
2. Australia should set an example as a sovereign nation which respects and recognises the rights of Timor-Leste’s people.
3. Australia should not promote or continue neocolonialism against Timor-Leste’s people, who have suffered this for centuries. We will no longer be your slaves.
4. The Abbott government should apologise to the Maubere people, who have been hugely discriminated against by Australia from the past to the present. If not, we will continue to demonstrate at the Australian Embassy for the indefinite future.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
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