Stateless man

Here's an interesting story. Robert Jovicic was born to Serbian parents whilst in France, 38 years ago. When he was two, his family moved to Australia.
He's a heroin addict who committed a series of robberies (described as burglaries in this report) in Australia. His visa was cancelled and he was deported from Australia to Serbia in June 2004. The Serbian government has declined to recognise him as a citizen, so he has no right to work or obtain welfare in Serbia. He is reportedly maintaining a vigil outside the Australian embassy in Belgrade - where it is snowing, by the way - presumably seeking the opportunity to return to Australia.

According to the Seven report, a statement from Senator Amanda Vanstone (the current Immigration minister, though she did not hold that portfolio when Jovicic's visa was cancelled - that was Phillip Ruddock) said that Jovicic was convicted of 'various charges of burglary, theft, possessing stolen property and possessing prohibited substances between 1984 and 2002'. Also according to that statement, Jovicic did apply for Australian citizenship in 1998, but was declined on character grounds (i.e. because of his criminal record). Jovicic's father resides in Serbia, and Vanstone states that Jovicic is eligible to apply for Serbian citizenship, but that (as of the date of the statement) he had not.

Mr Jovicic has clearly screwed his life up. All his crimes may well stem from a need to feed his heroin addiction, and they all appear to be crimes of property and drug possession, rather than violence. This would be both tragic and reprehensible in anyone, but in his own case he was - perhaps unwittingly at first - unaware that he was peculiarly vulnerable to the consequences of criminal activity. His family seem not to have assisted him in obtaining citizenship in Australia, although he lived here from the age of two - sixteen years by the time he became an adult. His convictions date from 1984 - when he would have been 17 years old - and as a heroin addict and burglar it's safe to say that even if he had been aware as a young adult of the potential consequences of his behaviour, he might well have continued on this path anyway. He applied for, and was denied, Australian citizenship in 1998 - when he would have been 31 - but by this time he had too many, or too serious, criminal convictions to pass the requirements applied by DIMIA. It seems likely that at this point it was inevitable that he would have his visa cancelled and that he would be deported.

It's not unreasonable that character standards should be applied to persons who wish to visit, or to become citizens of, Australia - that is, where possible, prospective visitors and citizens should not be convicted felons. But Mr Jovicic is one of those unfortunate cases where, while he clearly never was an Australian citizen, he seems never to have been anything else. Perhaps if he had arrived in Serbia under different circumstances, the Serbian government would have welcomed him as Serbian citizen - even though he was not born there and had perhaps never been there (update: he visited for six weeks when he was 17. That's it.) As the situation stands, he is a stateless person - not recognised as a citizen either by the place of origin of his parents, or of the country in which he spent almost his entire life - albeit as a visitor.

The News.com.au report states the bald facts, which frankly make DIMIA and former Immigration minister Phillip Ruddock seem heartless at best - easy enough to believe, surely, after the Solon/Alvarez case, the Rau case, and the controversy over mandatory detention of unlawful non-citizens. The Seven report is a bit different - current Immigration minister Amanda Vanstone's statement makes clear that Jovicic left Australia voluntarily, that the Australian embassy in Belgrade has obtained short-term accommodation and a medical checkup for Jovicic as a courtesy (they don't have to, after all, because he's not an Australian citizen - but their actions may have been dictated more by media sensitivity than by a desire to help Jovicic). Also, the added nuggets that Jovicic's father lives in Serbia and that Jovicic is eligible to apply for Serbian citizenship, but hasn't, does put a different complexion on the matter.

If true, Australia owes Jovicic nothing. He came to Australia as an innocent child, but remained a foreigner through the choice of his parents - and became a criminal, which may well be the result of poverty or childhood trauma, but remains nonetheless Jovicic's own responsibility. He didn't apply for citizenship until he'd been in Australia for 29 years, 13 of them as an adult. By the time he chose to apply for citizenship, he no longer fit the criteria - due to his own bad choices. He went voluntarily to Serbia - which probably means he didn't go in handcuffs, that being his other choice - but he has family there and, if Senator Vanstone is correct, can apply to become a citizen. His life will be what he makes of it, as it was before.

It's possible that Senator Vanstone's statement is rosier than the truth, though based on the reports I've read it's not possible to know. Perhaps Jovicic came from a broken home, is a prisoner of his heroin habit, has no relationship with his father or his relatives in Serbia, and perhaps he can't really get Serbian citizenship. If that's true, he's a victim, prosecuted when he should have been helped, stripped of citizenship in any country, trapped in a strange land, denied welfare or work.

The harsh moral of the story is this: in this world we have a short list of people who will help us when we need it. Friends, family, maybe our government if we're lucky, a few charity agencies. Help from strangers is so rare as to be a dream, like winning the lottery. Drug addiction is a quick route to alienating the people who will help you out of love. Crime is a quick route to making yourself ineligible for aid from official sources. And if you live in a country where you're not a citizen, for goodness' sake either make sure you follow the local rules, or have someplace else to live. Because you may well need it.

Update 09 March 2006: Jovicic has been permitted to return to Australia. Media attention and public opinion has probably had more to do with the government's decision than any ethic consideration, but then governments are like infants: they are entirely self-absorbed and have no morals, until they're taught to treat others with respect. Unlike infants, governments usually need to be taught over and over. Hopefully the Department of Immigration will, with this case in mind, actually weight the ethics of deporting persons with no other citizenship or with no ties to another country.

Policing and the Death Penalty

Brisbane's Sunday Mail of 06 November 2005 featured, under Jim Soorley's byline, an editorial titled "Police sentenced Bali kids to death". I can't find it on the Sunday Mail's web site, but here are a couple of excerpts:

It is now very clear to all who have followed the story of the Bali Nine that our federal police sold nine young Australians down the tube.

If any of the Bali Nine end up facing a firing squad for this crime, the AFP will have young Aussie blood on its hands.

Readers will likely recall that the Bali Nine are nine Australians arrested in Bali, Indonesia for possession of large quantities of heroin or for conspiracy. The arrests were made as the offenders were at Denpasar airport preparing to fly to Australia, some of them with kilograms of heroin in packages strapped to their bodies under their clothes.

In literal terms, if the Bali Nine are sentenced to death, it will be by an Indonesian court. Soorley is extending causality, suggesting that without the assistance of the AFP, Indonesian authorities would not have arrested the Bali 9, and that they would not now be awaiting a possible death sentence.

If you're going to extend the chain of causality, why not extend it a little further? The "Aussie kids" - a lovely emotive term that, they're all young adults - have been sentenced to death by their own choice to become involved in heroin smuggling. They have claimed that they faced threats of harm to themselves or their family if they didn't participate, and these claims may even be true, but if so they don't excuse their acts - they had a choice, and the better choice would have been to talk to the police. I would go so far as to say that the "Aussie kids" have been sentenced to death by whomever it was that organised the smuggling operation.

Part of the AFP's recent successes in combating international drug crime is down to the AFP's strategy of close engagement with the Police agencies of neighbouring countries. Many of the countries in the region still retain the death penalty and are likely to continue to do so for some years. This fact should not be permitted to hamstring Police efforts to detect and catch criminals.

If any of the Bali 9 are executed, by Soorley's logic, the hangman's hands will be many - the Indonesian courts, the Indonesian customs and Police, Australian Police, but also the Bali 9 themselves and whomever recruited them for their short careers as drug mules.

The death penalty is no longer supported in Australia, but many of our foreign neighbours don't agree. An argument could be made for selective international cooperation based on the likelihood of a death sentence in the event of a conviction. Ultimately, however, the decision as to whether the death penalty should be applied is one for each nation's people. A policy of refusing to cooperate in potential death penalty cases would be cutting off our nose to spite our face - failure to cooperate would likely result in persons responsible for major crimes in Australia remaining at large, and the refusal would not be likely to change other countries' positions regarding the death penalty.

Indonesia has responsibility for sentencing those Aussie kids to death, if it should come to that. That's their decision. The Bali 9's decision was to risk the penalties in Indonesia and Australia. Soorley's decision was to denigrate the AFP for their efforts in fighting transnational crime by painting them as executioners.