East Timor yesterday said it will ask an international court in the Netherlands to order Australia to return documents seized by the Australian secret service relating to a legal dispute over oil and gas revenue-sharing between the countries.
East Timorese Minister of State Agio Pereira said in a statement that his government will ask the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague for an interim order requiring Australia to hand over the documents to the court.
That order would stand pending a final decision on East Timor’s demand for their return.
BUGGED
Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) agents last month raided the homes in the Australian capital, Canberra, of a lawyer and a former spy who intended to testify before the same court that Australia allegedly bugged the East Timorese Cabinet ahead of sensitive oil and gas revenue-sharing negotiations.
Pereira said the agents also seized the spy’s passport, preventing him from traveling to The Hague to testify.
Pereira said the documents related to East Timor’s challenge to the validity of a bilateral treaty struck with Australia in 2006 over sharing seabed oil and gas reserves between the countries worth billions of US dollars.
CONFIDENTIAL
East Timor is arguing that the agreement is invalid because Australia had illegally bugged government offices and listened to confidential discussions relating to the negotiations.
“Timor-Leste contends that the ... treaty is invalid and ineffective because Australia secretly and unlawfully spied on Timor-Leste, bugging its government offices and listening in to highly confidential discussions during the course of the negotiations on the treaty,” Pereira said, referring to East Timor by its Portuguese name.
Australian Attorney General George Brandis, who authorized the ASIO raids, said in a statement yesterday that “it would be inappropriate to comment on the substance of the dispute” because it was before the court.
He had previously revealed that he had told ASIO that none of the seized information was to be shared with lawyers representing Australia in The Hague.
Australia negotiated the treaty after East Timor, a half-island nation, broke away from Indonesia in a 1999 UN sanctioned independence ballot.
Indonesia had previously struck a similar agreement to share the seabed.
REBUILDING: A researcher said that it might seem counterintuitive to start talking about reconstruction amid the war with Russia, but it is ‘actually an urgent priority’ Italy is hosting the fourth annual conference on rebuilding Ukraine even as Russia escalates its war, inviting political and business leaders to Rome to promote public-private partnerships on defense, mining, energy and other projects as uncertainty grows about the US’ commitment to Kyiv’s defense. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy were opening the meeting yesterday, which gets under way as Russia accelerated its aerial and ground attacks against Ukraine with another night of pounding missile and drone attacks on Kyiv. Italian organizers said that 100 official delegations were attending, as were 40 international organizations and development banks. There are
The tale of a middle-aged Chinese man, or “uncle,” who disguised himself as a woman to secretly film and share videos of his hookups with more than 1,000 men shook China’s social media, spurring fears for public health, privacy and marital fidelity. The hashtag “red uncle” was the top trending item on China’s popular microblog Sina Weibo yesterday, drawing at least 200 million views as users expressed incredulity and shock. The online posts told of how the man in the eastern city of Nanjing had lured 1,691 heterosexual men into sexual encounters at his home that he then recorded and distributed online. The
TARIFF ACTION: The US embassy said that the ‘political persecution’ against former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro disrespects the democratic traditions of the nation The US and Brazil on Wednesday escalated their row over US President Donald Trump’s support for former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, with Washington slapping a 50 percent tariff on one of its main steel suppliers. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva threatened to reciprocate. Trump has criticized the prosecution of Bolsonaro, who is on trial for allegedly plotting to cling on to power after losing 2022 elections to Lula. Brasilia on Wednesday summoned Washington’s top envoy to the country to explain an embassy statement describing Bolsonaro as a victim of “political persecution” — echoing Trump’s description of the treatment of Bolsonaro as
CEREMONY EXPECTED: Abdullah Ocalan said he believes in the power of politics and social peace, not weapons, and called on the group to put that into practice The jailed leader of a Kurdish militant group yesterday renewed a call for his fighters to lay down their arms, days before a symbolic disarmament ceremony is expected to take place as a first concrete step in a peace process with the Turkish state. In a seven-minute video message broadcast on pro-Kurdish Medya Haber’s YouTube channel, Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), said that the peace initiative had reached a stage that required practical steps. “It should be considered natural for you to publicly ensure the disarmament of the relevant groups in a way that addresses the expectations
RSS