Last Friday, I visited 22-year-old Australian citizen Scott Rush in the Kerobokan prison on the Indonesian island of Bali where he is on death row for being a hapless drug mule. Scott wrote a letter that day to those attending a dinner organised by his parents in Brisbane for Australians Against Capital Punishment:
I'd like to thank you all for all that you are doing for me and the others here at the Death Tower. To all of you who have come to this function I would like to thank you for your caring and showing solidarity by your presence. There is not much that I can say in my circumstances but I can say this: I'm not a celebrity. I have committed a serious crime but I am reforming myself and want to show you that I am capable of complete reform.
Sunday was the sixth anniversary of the Bali bombings which claimed 202 lives, including 88 Australians. Early morning, the Australian Consulate hosted a memorial service for victims' families.
Made Pastika, the Balinese Governor who, as Head of Police, led the successful police investigation into the bombings, spoke at the service recalling how the paradise of Bali had been transformed into a living hell. He espoused the common humanity of all, reminding us that the victims were of all religions and none, of many races, of nationalities near and far.
The Indonesian choir sang 'Advance Australia Fair' with conviction and the 'Ave Maria' with reverence, as well as the Indonesian anthem and an Indonesian song.
Many wept as they came forward to place flowers at the foot of the wooden cross which had been erected outside the Consulate immediately after the bombing. All felt deep sympathy for the victims and their families. The media-amplified pleas of some of them that the bombers be executed, and quickly, were understandable.
For me, talk of the death penalty evoked the young, frightened face of Scott Rush, as well as the laughing, haughty faces of Amrozi, Mukhlas and Imam Samudra.
I had been troubled by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's response to the gloating Bali bombers at the end of Ramadan a couple of weeks earlier: 'The Bali bombers are cowards and murderers pure and simple, and frankly they can make whatever threats they like,' he said. 'They deserve the justice that we delivered to them.'
I thought the time had come when our national leaders could espouse that justice excludes the death penalty for anyone, no matter what their offence and no matter what their lack of remorse. After all, just before Christmas, the new Rudd Government had voted at the UN for a motion urging retentionist States to 'establish a moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty'.
When Australian citizen Nguyen Tuong Van was facing the death penalty in Singapore in 2005, Kevin Rudd told Parliament: 'We hold one fundamental human value to be true, and that is the intrinsic dignity of all human life. It is for this reason that we oppose all forms of capital punishment. For our policy to be credible, we must apply it universally. We must be credible in our opposition to capital punishment as a matter of policy wherever it occurs.'
For Scott's sake, and for the sake of the community of nations working towards a moratorium on the death penalty, this should be Australia's position. Withholding none of the sympathy I felt all around me at the consulate last Sunday morning, I think Australia is ready to be led and to lead others down a more humane path, away from the death penalty.
Some of us have been waiting a long time for this lead. I have been waiting since I was 12 years old at a Queensland country boarding school.
It was 3 February 1967. Breakfast started at 7.45 a.m. The din of 300 boys at table was always deafening once the supervising priest declared, 'Deo Gratias'.
For the first and only time in my five years at the school, a handful of senior boys called for a minute's silence at 8.00 a.m. to mark the hanging of Ronald Ryan in Melbourne Jail. As Ryan dropped, you could hear a pin drop in faraway Toowoomba. The recollection still brings goose bumps. This was wrong. It should never happen again. How could a nation do this?
All Australian jurisdictions then abolished the death penalty, and now our government has joined the call for an international moratorium.
In 1995, I was working in a Sudanese refugee camp on the Uganda border. At night I would sit in my tent listening to the BBC World Service on the short wave radio. One night I heard the announcement that the South African Constitutional Court had ruled the death penalty unconstitutional.
The lead judgement had been written by the president of the court, Arthur Chaskalson. We had shared the platform at the opening of the Commonwealth Legal Convention in New Zealand a couple of years before. When returning to Australia via Johannesburg I met Arthur and he proudly gave me a copy of the judgement. He had quoted liberally from the dissenting jurisprudence of Justices Brennan and Thurgood Marshall on the US Supreme Court.
I happened to be on my way to Georgetown Law School on a Fulbright where I had the good fortune to meet regularly with my namesake Justice Brennan who, though retired, still came into chambers. Over lunch one day, I gave him my copy of Chaskalson's judgment. Tears welled up in his eyes as he realised that some of his most sterile and consistent dissent writing had borne fruit on the other side of the globe.
There is always point in standing up for principle even when the view expressed is unpopular and a minority view. Like Justices Chaskalson and Brennan, Prime Minister Rudd is well positioned to contribute to the abolition of the death penalty. None of us should ever again have to look into the eyes of Scott Rush returning to the Death Tower.
This article is an extract from Father Frank Brennan's remarks delivered at the Ubud Writers' Festival in Bali today. The full text of his address is available here.
Pictured (from top): Frank Brennan with Scott Rush's lawyer, Colin McDonald QC outside Kerobokan Prison; Made Pakista; placing flowers at the consulate; the wooden cross at the consulate.