Independent Senator Jacqui Lambie has asked the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to investigate allegations of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan.
The Tasmanian revealed on the Senate floor on Tuesday afternoon that a referral had been made to the ICC.
“The government is no doubt hoping this will all just go away, they’re hoping that Australians will forget that when alleged war crimes in Afghanistan were investigated, senior commanders got a free pass, while their diggers were thrown under the bus,” she said.
She alleged in her speech that “allegations of unlawful behaviour” had been “reported all the way up the Special Forces chain of command” but that senior commanders hadn’t been held accountable.
The letter to the ICC, penned by Lambie, two law offices and a Queensland company called Global Security Group, called for the court to “undertake an investigation of the ADF higher command in the context of the ongoing activity in respect of the situation in Afghanistan already under investigation”.
Lambie told the Senate that the referral to the ICC was “a last resort”.
“It isn’t easy to get them to investigate. They can only do this if the state party — in this case Australia — has failed to investigate,” she said.
Lambie, a defence force veteran, asked to table some documents in the Senate, but her colleagues on the crossbench and in the opposition asked for some time to pore through them before deciding.
Rumours Lambie would stand up to make a special announcement had been circulating in the press gallery earlier in the morning.
It’s understood some senators were surprised by the move.
Several Greens senators could be seen huddling on the Senate floor while Lambie was speaking.
“The Australian Greens have been provided with these documents, but it was literally within the last two minutes,” Senator Nick McKim said.
“There are numerous documents in the binder … and many of these documents are very lengthy, there are hundreds of documents.”
It’s understood that the bundle Lambie sought to table included the ICC referral, transcripts from Senate estimates, Parliamentary Library research material, and a doctoral thesis written by an academic.
A probe known as the Brereton inquiry was opened in May 2016 to investigate rumours that war crimes had been committed in Afghanistan.
It concluded with a report in 2020 that found evidence of dozens of murders committed by Australian troops.
Ben Roberts-Smith, an SAS commander who served in Afghanistan, was recently found, on the balance of probabilities, to have committed war crimes in Afghanistan.
That conclusion was reached by a judge acting in a defamation case brought by Roberts-Smith against newspapers that had reported the allegations.
