Military courts ruled unconstitutional

[Rowlesmr]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009 ... =australia

The High Court has ruled military courts unconstitutional because the judges aren't independent of the chain-of-command.

The Defence Minister is introducing new laws to fix the system, but they can't pass until Parliment sits again. In a week...

[C-130]

That's only a problem for the Army, we're more civilised in the RAAF

[Rowlesmr]

Considering this has come about from a challenge from a sailor...

[John Brunton]

Time for a spending spree on my Defence Travel Card!!!

[MSI]

Typical of the media use a constitutional law expert to talk about military law.

Constitutional law expert George Williams says that in the interim, the military is left without a justice system.

We still do have a military justice system. We just don’t have an AMC, which deals with only a small proportion (albeit relatively serious) of total DFDA cases. We still have the discipline officer system and still have the ability to deal with problems administratively.

Not every case of unmade beds requires the crack legal expertise of JAG and the Australian Military Court! Nor is the ADF full of crack dealing, baby killing, rapist so that not having the AMC will leave us with a huge backlog of serious criminal cases to deal with!

With the exception of SGT Brunton’s potential case I think it unlikely the ADF will descend into anarchy and mob rule.

[DEFIANT 74205]

The High Court has ruled military courts unconstitutional because the judges aren't independent of the chain-of-command.

That's only part of it. The main reason why the AMC was found to be unconstitutional was that the 2006 Act which established this court did not comply with the guidelines of a Commonwealth court set out in Chapter III of the Constitution. In the joint judgment from Chief Justice French and Justice Gummow, who said that

Lane v Morrison [2009] HCA 29 at [62]
"Once it was decided to deal with the 1982 Act not by the creation of a Ch III court but by the creation of the AMC, the 2006 Act became vulnerable to the attack now successfully made upon the validity of the AMC. The power conferred by s 51(vi) does not extend to the creation of a "legislative court", in the sense discussed in these reasons, which operates outside the previous system of military justice."

If the Commonwealth had chosen to carefully abide by the provisions of the Constitution in the creation of the AMC, then perhaps this challenge would never have succeeded.

For those who are interested, the full text of the judgment is here:
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/high_ct/2009/29.html

[mitchell_newell]

This is a big jump from 1901 when we took the right to a court-martial from the british after the fiasco of Lt's Morant and Hancock