Assets frozen
August 3, 2011
Supreme Court judge Peter Garling on Wednesday froze a family trust holding Hicks' book profits, while his lawyers and Canberra's legal team continued "advanced" talks about how the case should be resolved. The hearing will resume on August 16.
The Australian government considers all profits from his autobiography, "Guantanamo, My Journey" to be criminal. The book has already sold 30,000 copies and describes Hicks' "six years of hell" in the prison in Cuba including the events that led up to his arrest.
Illegitimate conviction
Hicks claims the conviction was not legitimate and is expected to challenge the authority of the commission system in Australia and conditions under which his guilty plea was obtained.
According to Australia's "Proceeds of Crime" law, a person cannot gain commercial benefit from a crime. This prevents criminals from receiving payment for writing books about their offences.
Australian law expert Clive Williams says, Australia's law in this case favors the prosecution, but Hicks may use the court case to publicly raise issues over his conviction: "He may well raise issues going to the nature of his plea, whether duress was involved, whether it was a plea that should be recognized under the Australian legal system...For David Hicks to defeat the claim, the attempt to seize those assets, he will have to raise questions that go to the heart of his conviction."
Stint with al Qaeda
Hicks was captured in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks and was convicted by an American military commission of providing material support for terrorism. He was kept in Guantanamo from 2001 to 2007. According to police evidence given at a U.S. military court, he admitted training with Al Qaeda and meeting its former leader Osama bin Laden, who Hicks described as being "lovely."
Hicks, a former kangaroo skinner, is now 35 years old and living in Sydney. He has been referred to as the "Aussie Taliban" and was returned to Australia in April 2007. He served the remaining nine months of the commission sentence in a local prison there.
Author: Manasi Gopalakrishnan (AFP, Reuters)
Editor: Sanjiv Burman