If the Beirut child snatch story had come off we could expect to see an episode of 60 Minutes with all its distinctive elements: sonorous voiceover, nerve-tingling music, tear-stained interview, dramatic street scenes and cloying journalistic satisfaction that a wrong had been righted and justice done.
All the traditional elements of entertainment infused with “current affairs”.
Instead, we are left with a pile of unanswered questions from a TV network looking shabbier than usual. Who authorised the Beirut story, who signed off on the payments to facilitate it, was legal advice provided, and will the results of an inquiry conducted by Nine Network insiders be made public?
No response to those questions has emerged from Nine’s spinners. Instead, we are gracelessly flicked a non-statement and told: “This note to Nine staff from [chief executive] Hugh Marks is all that we are saying.”
There’s another important question: why did Nine seek to fudge the truth about payments to the abduction recovery “expert” Adam Whittington and his company? The network has been content to let the public and the relevant authorities believe that the abduction recovery was being driven by Faulkner. Now it’s evident that Nine’s fingerprints are all over bank transfers to IPCA Ltd, a corporate entity associated with Whittington, and that the network is involved in orchestrating the botched rescue mission.
The extent to which there has been a failure of journalistic ethics by Nine could conceivably be analysed at journalism schools around the country for decades to come. Letting the co-conspirators swing in the breeze while Nine’s precious cargo of talent pays its way out of trouble deserves an entire chapter.
Marks’s note does contain this extraordinary line:
... at no stage did anyone from Nine or 60 Minutes intend to act in any way that made them susceptible to charges that they had breached the law or to become part of the story that is Sally’s story.
In other words, to Marks’s way of thinking, an intention to engage with British “recovery” lads to snatch children off the street of a foreign country miraculously would not leave any of the perpetrators open to criminal charges, if caught.
He’s having a big lend of us. For now the stuff-up is to be buried in an internal inquiry headed by 60 Minutes founding executive producer Gerald Stone along with David Hurley, a former executive producer of the tabloid news program A Current Affair, and Nine’s general counsel Rachel Landers.
Stone and Hurley have been at the cutting edge of chequebook journalism. It’s surprising former 60 Minutes presenter Ray Martin wasn’t included on the panel, what with his experience as a get-away driver for an earlier Channel Nine child snatch in Spain. Maybe, that was too far a stretch even for Nine because last week Martin told ABC radio that the 60 Minutes crew has been “ethical and I think they have done the right thing”.
The ABC has outsourced its inquiries into programs that came in for a bit of grief. Q&A, following the non-problem of Zaky Mallah, was investigated by Martin and former SBS managing director Shaun Brown. It would have been refreshingly smart of Nine to give this inquiry to a team at arm’s length and to make the findings public – after all, public resources in the form of foreign affairs and consular help were expended for reporter Tara Brown, her producer, cameraman and sound recorder.
Whatever Hugh Marks wants us to think, this exercise was an extra-judicial stunt. Maybe it is understandable on the part of the mother, Sally Faulkner, who believed she had few other avenues by which to gain access to her two young children, taken to Lebanon nearly a year ago by their father.
The Hague Convention on the civil aspects of international child abduction doesn’t work in this case, because while Australia is a party to the convention, Lebanon is not.
The convention seeks to protect the status quo, in other words the arrangement that existed before a child was improperly removed is the one that should persist under international law. That would mean that Faulkner’s children most likely would be subject to the original orders of the Australian courts in relation to custody and access.
However, there is a bilateral agreement between Lebanon and Australia dealing with the welfare of children who are the victim of cross-border parental disputes. It simply sets up a governmental framework to “encourage dialogue between parents and assist in finding an amicable resolution ...”.
The department of the attorney general admits that “the process can be very slow and frustrating, it may take many months, or even years, to resolve the matter [and] the outcome may not be what the applicant was originally seeking”.
In these circumstances, it’s little wonder Sally Faulkner became a Nine Network victim.
Then we have the byzantine arrangements under Lebanese law, which draws its inspiration from French civil law and to our way of thinking in the common law world is puzzling, if not downright disturbing.
Here, the father of the children, Ali al-Amin brought his own personal criminal charges, filed at the local police station. These included armed abduction, threats and physical harm. At the same time the state is bringing similar or parallel criminal charges of its own.
According to Ghassan Moghabghab, Faulkner’s Beirut lawyer, with whom Guardian Australia spoke on Thursday by phone, the Lebanese attorney general has sent criminal charges to the prosecutors’ office and they are likely then to go to the Chamber of Accusations.
The private charges would have had to be withdrawn by the father if the state had not brought its own charges. In this instance, because the attorney general and the public prosecutors are now involved it was open to do a deal with the private prosecutor, involving money, and lots of it, along with undertakings about child custody.
Here is a legal system in which money can make part of the problem go away. It is also overlaid with religious courts, whose jurisdiction in some instances overrides state law.
The TV crew and Faulkner have been whisked back to the common law world on bail, unlikely ever to see inside the Chamber of Accusations. At this point the child recovery “experts” are still doing porridge or, in this instance, falafel.
