David Hicks - Repatriation, Release and Charge Ruled Invalid

Repatriation, Release and Charge Ruled Invalid

On 20 May 2007 Hicks arrived at RAAF Base Edinburgh in Adelaide, South Australia on a chartered flight reported to have cost the Australian government up to A$500,000. Attorney-General Philip Ruddock asserted that this arrangement was the consequence of US restrictions on the transit of Hicks through US airspace or territory preventing the use of less expensive commercial flights. Hicks was taken to Adelaide's Yatala Labour Prison where he was kept in solitary confinement in the state's highest-security ward, G Division.

Hicks was released on 29 December 2007 and placed under a control order obtained by the AFP earlier that month. The order required Hicks to not leave Australia, to report to a police station three times a week, and to use only an AFP-approved mobile phone SIM card. On 19 February 2008 he was given special dispensation by federal magistrate Warren Donald to leave South Australia. On 20 February 2008, Hicks moved to Abbotsford, New South Wales. A curfew between 1:00am and 5:00am was imposed. Hicks' control order expired in December 2008 and the AFP did not renew it.

Hicks married Aloysia Hicks, a human rights activist who studied at the University of Sydney. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Michael Mori, one of his former military attorneys, attended the ceremony. It was also reported that Dick Smith secured employment for Hicks in a Sydney landscape gardening business.

During 2010 there were calls for Hicks to commence action to clear his name of the charges. In May 2011 his father, wife and supporters, including former politician and justice John Dowd, former Human Rights Commissioner Elizabeth Evatt, human rights lawyer Julian Burnside, along with others started a campaign to clear Hicks' name and to push for an inquiry into his alleged mistreatment in Guantanamo. Their campaign launch featured Brandon Neely, a former US soldier who guarded Hicks in Guantanamo.

In October 2012 the United States Court of Appeals ruled that the charge under which Hicks had been convicted was invalid because the law did not exist at the time of the alleged offence, and it could not be applied retrospectively. The efforts of the US to charge Hicks have been described as "a significant departure from the Geneva Conventions and the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, quite apart from the US constitution", the implications being that "anyone in the world, who has suitable radical connections and who is in a war zone fighting against Americans, is guilty of a war crime".