A fair trial, but not in our media

June 01, 2005
By Paul Kelly

THE media-induced campaign over the Schapelle Corby case is counterproductive for Corby, damaging for our national interest and suggests an immaturity in Australia that will rebound on us as a nation.

The problem begins with the popular media's assumption of Corby's innocence. For many of the shock jocks this is a given. It is the key to the campaign because once you assume a defendant is innocent, then Indonesia's legal system is guilty of an outrageous injustice. The point, of course, is that the media doesn't know that Corby is innocent. It has no justification whatsoever for this assumption. It is natural to be moved and feel sorry at Corby's tragic plight. But it is irresponsible to decide that she is innocent and mount a vast media campaign to this end.

The shock jock fall-back position is that Corby did not get a fair trial, an impression created by the unwise comment of chief judge Linton Sirait that "as far as I can remember in a drugs case I haven't yet set anyone free". Sirait also said he wouldn't be influenced by crying and would decide "solely on the evidence".

For weeks, the University of Melbourne's Asian Law Centre director Tim Lindsey has been warning that Corby's defence was weak on the evidence, despite the absolute denial of the popular media. "This was always going to be a difficult case to defend," Lindsey told me. "It was very easy for the prosecution to establish a prima-facie case and it would have been a prima-facie case anywhere.

"The Indonesian Customs officers said she was reluctant to open the bag and that when it was opened and she was confronted she acknowledged the drugs were hers. Now it may be the Customs officers are lying. But the defence case was always based on denial and the judge had to make a call on the 'they said, she said' issue. It was entirely within the bounds of the court to find the Customs officers were more convincing than the evidence by Schapelle's friends and family. This is a perfectly understandable conclusion for the court to draw. The claim that this is demonstrably an injustice is just foolish.

"This is not a situation of right and wrong. It is about evidence in a court. If we abandon the test of evidence, then we go back to burning witches. For people to say Indonesia's system has failed because they have a feeling Corby is innocent is Lindy Chamberlain in reverse."

It is the weakness of the Corby defence that has led to the claim of an unfair trial, a claim that is unsustainable. The next ploy of the popular media was to blame John Howard and demand that he get her released. This is utterly futile. The Government has leaned over backwards to help, doing things for Corby it has never done for other Australians on drug charges. But Indonesia, a constitutional democracy as well as a proud nation, would never allow Australia's leader to intervene in its judicial system.

It is inconceivable that Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono would approach Howard if the situation was reversed. Howard won't ring Yudhoyono because, as he told Sydney radio station 2GB, it won't help Corby in the slightest. He told Australians to respect the court's decision and not to make a judgment about it, and he was right. For 30 years, since the start of the East Timor saga, Australians have deluded themselves about our ability to change domestic events in Jakarta. When will we learn?

The assumptions that underpin these Australian attitudes are patronising and alarming. ANU Indonesia expert Greg Fealy says: "For a country that casts itself as knowledgeable about Indonesia we have displayed ignorance and misunderstanding. There is a sense in the popular sentiment that our approach is right and that Indonesia reflects a less civilised country."

Corby is lucky that so far this hysterical media campaign has not lodged in Indonesia's political system, but that is changing and it represents a more serious threat.

Fealy warns: "The more this campaign becomes a political issue in Indonesia, then the harder it will become for President Yudhoyono to grant a pardon at a later date or to arrange a prisoner exchange."

Once anti-Australian sentiment ignites in the Indonesian system the consequences for Corby will be even worse. All Australians have an interest in an evidence-based judicial system in Indonesia, as the trial and convictions of the Bali bombers proved. But the popular media's distortion of the Bali trials is the greatest travesty in this story.

This is the same court, the same judge and the same procedure that convicted a few dozen of the Bali bombers and brought down death sentences against three of them. Yet most of popular media not only ignores this but focuses on the light sentence given to extremist cleric Abu Bakar Bashir as a device to manipulate public outrage.

Lindsey says: "The problem in the Abu Bakar Bashir case was that the defence lawyers sliced up the prosecution evidence. He was deemed to be head of Jemaah Islamiah but the difficulty lay in the evidence tying him to the bombing." Once again, the case went on the evidence.

The media has erected a false comparison between the Corby and Bashir cases. In the process it seeks to obliterate the prompt and punitive actions taken by the Indonesian court against the bombers, an action that promoted a sense of public trust in Australia. This is a betrayal of the Bali victims.

"The court ran the Corby trial in much the same way that it ran the Bali bombers trial," Lindsey says.

"After the bombers were sentenced there were people in this country saying they would like to pull the trigger. So we are now being totally hypocritical. Australians can't have it both ways. We like the Indonesian courts when they convict our enemies who are Asian but we won't accept it when they convict a white Australian woman. We're either inconsistent or racist and the Indonesians see this. We love the court for the terrorists and we hate the court for Schapelle Corby. This will do Australia a lot of harm."

As a nation Australia has badly mishandled the Corby case and it has a long way to run. Corby has been let down by her legal team and a reckless popular media.

Taken from The Australian