If the past is another country then someone should tell Fat Tony Mokbel that the charges he was accused of today in the Melbourne Magistrates Court didn’t happen to someone else.
A tanned sombre black-suited Fat Tony was teleported from his spaceship in Barwon prison to the high-tech control room that is Court 13 on the fourth floor where he was quick smart remanded in custody until June 24.
Defence lawyer Mirko Bagaric basically argued that The Man Who Wasn’t There on the screen really shouldn’t be here because he had been nicked illegally from his Greek domicile at the weekend.
Bagaric, who is as seriously wacky as his client, said Mokbel should still be in Greece waiting patiently for his pending appeal in the European Court of Human Rights.
“By extraditing my client back while that appeal is still proceeding, the executive of this country has wantonly destroyed my client’s right to an appeal,” he said.
Mr Bagaric said under those circumstances Mr Mokbel’s extradition constituted an illegal act.
“It is my submission that my client is being held unlawfully in the circumstances he was brought back to Australia.”
So there you have it in nutshell. He’s not here. He’s not supposed to be here. He shouldn’t be here. He has never been here. He should be there. There, presumably, is Strasbourg in France, where the European Court of Human Rights lives. But perhaps Neverland is a more fitting location for the Man Who Wasn’t There.
Curiouser and curiouser Bargaric who advocates legalisation of torture and who used the interrogator role to give hard-heart decisions to asylum seekers as a Refugee Review Tribunal member is now hanging his defence of Mr Mokbel on the EU Human Rights treaty. Pity he was not a greater believer in human rights when he was deciding the fate of asylum seekers.
I do not think that the “Kooka Brothers” should be so disparaging about Mr Bagaric who is of course a professor of law at Deakin University according to their website.
Mr Bagaric raises some very important issues about human rights and the right to a fair hearing in the European jurisdiction to which Mr Mokbel fled to escape inequities of the Australian judicial system, which requires convicted criminals to actually spend their sentence in jail.
It would appear that avoidance of criminal custodial punishment is not dissimilar to the act of tax avoidance where one chooses the jurisdiction in which one wishes to be taxed, aided and abetted by smart lawyers.
It would appear that we need a similar situation for structured criminal justice in which one chooses the jurisdiction in which one wishes to be punished. All criminals the then have to do is leave the country undetected and domicile themselves in an appropriate criminal jurisdiction with a bill of human rights protect the
After all this saint of a man has shown his committment to human rights rather than biased family responsibilities by letting his sister in law go to jail for posting his bail. My hero!