Australians are held hostage and tortured overseas – and we play roulette with them

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Britain now has a senior official whose job is to bring home citizens wrongfully detained abroad. Australia decided it doesn’t need one.

With states increasingly weaponising hostage diplomacy, and Australians facing heightened dangers, the government has rejected a Senate recommendation for a special envoy for wrongfully detained Australians.

Britain appointed former Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt as its first envoy for complex consular detentions. In cases referred to him by the foreign secretary, he will provide senior strategic oversight, co-ordinate work across government, engage with families and offer ministers an independent perspective.

Hostage diplomacy is coercion through deliberately inflicted suffering: the definition of torture reduced to statecraft.

Australia has chosen a different course. In its formal response to the Senate inquiry in June, the government said it “partially accepts” the recommendation. It will retain its complex case committee and appoint special envoys only when officials decide the case requires one, arguing this provides flexibility across a diverse caseload.

In my four years as United Nations special rapporteur on torture and other ill-treatment, my caseload returned again and again to hostage diplomacy: individuals detained abroad not for anything they had done, but for what they were worth. I dealt with families as angry with their own governments as with the kidnappers – because they felt ignored and their demands unanswered. What they wanted was rarely complicated. They wanted to know that someone senior was responsible, and that the file would not go quiet when the........

© Brisbane Times