Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

I am grateful to the Senator for raising this issue. Since publication of the Bill several concerns have been expressed about the possibility that a person engaged in activity against an oppressive or tyrannical regime might be prosecuted and convicted under the provisions of the Bill.

As I said on Committee Stage in the other House, however, there is no solution to the issue which these amendments attempt to address in good faith. I am conscious of the Senator's belief and that of the Human Rights Commission that insertion of the word "democratic" would solve the problem but that is not the case. There are regimes which some would regard as democratic but others would not, according to one's definition of the word "democratic".

On Committee Stage in the other House I cited the example of the republic generally called North Korea, which refers to itself as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The Communist Party of North Korea has created a dictatorship of the proletariat which it claims is in some sense democratic. Many Marxist guerrillas around the world are still trying to establish dictatorships of the proletariat on Marxist-Leninist principles. In their minds they are establishing democracy but that is far from what we would regard as democratic.

North Korea is not the only example of this; there are many others. The multi-party system may not be a prerequisite for definition of a democracy. For example, as I understand it, the People's Republic of Cuba allows only one party to contest elections, the Communist Party. Others are not allowed to organise parties to run for election, which is hardly democratic.

The obverse is that there are still autocracies of one kind or another around the world. I see from today's newspapers that the King of Nepal has extensive powers and faces a classic Maoist guerrilla movement which seeks leadership. It is difficult to say that either a Marxist-Leninist group or a king is democratic. When one looks at the Arab Emirates, the kingdoms and principalities around the world, one is forced to ask what the word democratic means and whether including it here would solve any problems.

Is a person contending for power in a manifestly undemocratic regime, such as those in some Arabian peninsula states, free to carry out acts of terrorism? There must be a point at which it is not legitimate for someone to commit terrorist acts in states such as Saudi Arabia or Brunei just because they do not have our system of democracy.

The mechanism chosen, after 18 months debate in Government, to give the Attorney General's approval the status of a condition precedent to a prosecution going on under this legislation, is a better approach than the superficially plausible but deeply problematic statement that it would be a defence for anybody planning a terrorist act to show that the state against which he or she plotted was not democratic. We would not accept that a person accused here of planning to set off a bomb in a supermarket in Havana would have a full defence in law because he persuaded a court or jury that the system in Cuba was not what we would call democratic. Likewise, for someone to perpetrate an equivalent act in a state because it is a monarchy is not a defence. That is not a viable method for distinguishing the two cases.