The immigration minister, Peter Dutton, has accused Gillian Triggs of an “outrageous slur” by linking the death of two Bali Nine drug smugglers to Australia’s asylum seeker policy.
Dutton has called for the Australian Human Rights Commission president to retract her words.
The Australian newspaper reports Triggs made the comments during a Committee for Economic Development of Australia forum in Adelaide on Thursday.
“Boats have got to stop,” she said. “But have we thought about what the consequences are of pushing people back to our neighbour Indonesia? Is it any wonder that Indonesia will not engage with us on other issues that we care about, like the death penalty?”
Triggs’s office said she was not referring to specific cases, but rather reflecting on the death penalty in the region more broadly.
Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were executed by firing squad in Indonesia in April after an unsuccessful attempt to smuggle heroin from Bali to Australia in 2005.
Dutton is furious that Triggs linked their deaths to the Coalition’s boat turnback measure, a cornerstone of its hardline Operation Sovereign Borders policy.
“Professor Triggs holds a very high office in this country and the Australian public believe, I think, that people in these positions should act in a responsible way,” he told reporters in Brisbane on Friday. “I welcome the fact that Professor Triggs this morning has done a partial backflip, but she needs to confront the cameras to retract this outrageous slur.”
“I think Professor Triggs trying to make some nexus between these two issues, it is a complete outrage and she should retract her statements today,” Dutton said, adding the claims were “completely without foundation”.
“I ask Professor Triggs to take into consideration the feelings of the family of two men involved.”
Indonesia has previously been critical of Australia’s turnback policy, saying a regional approach is needed to tackle the problem of people smuggling.
Triggs has previously drawn criticism from the government for a scathing report into children in immigration detention, with pressure from some Coalition MPs for the commissioner to resign.
Late on Friday afternoon, Dutton upped the ante, releasing a joint statement with attorney general George Brandis putting further pressure on Triggs, saying her comments were “poorly informed and foolish”.
“Professor Triggs chose to make her remarks with no specific knowledge of the many steps the Australian government took to save the lives of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, and with no professional experience in diplomacy and no specialist knowledge of the Australia-Indonesia relationship,” the statement said.
“As a lawyer, she knows better than to assert conclusions in the absence of evidence. Her comments were not in defence of human rights, but a gratuitous intervention in a difficult political issue.”
