Julian Moti

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Julian Moti QC (Solomon Islands), Cross of the Solomon Islands, BA (Hons) (Sydney), LLB (Australian National University), GDLP (University of Technology, Sydney) is the recently appointed Attorney-General of the Solomon Islands . An adjunct professor of law at Bond University on Australia's Gold Coast near Brisbane, Queensland, Moti taught comparative constitutional law, public and private international law, transnational litigation and arbitration, international trade, finance and investment in Australasia and the Pacific. He was founding President of the Pacific Islands Branch of the International Law Association (ILA), served on the ILA Committee on Compensation for Victims of War and has been a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India.

Mr Moti has been at the centre of an international row over attempts by Australia to have Moti extradited from Papua New Guinea to Australia to face charges of child sex abuse^[1] for an incident of sexual abuse of a female minor alleged to have taken place in Vanuatu in 1997.^[2]

The new Australian charges against Mr Moti are extraordinary because a Senior Magistrate in Vanuatu in August 1999 dismissed the charges of under age sex, finding that there was no prima facie case, ruling that the charges were "unjust and oppressive”, and awarding Mr Moti his legal costs. The Vanuatu prosecutorial authorities did not pursue any appeal against the Magistrate's decision, and the Vanuatu Police considered that the matter was closed in 1999. A civil suit by the female minor against Mr Moti was settled in 2000 with a Vanuatu court judgment issued in favour of Mr Moti.

The lawyer-journalist and biographer David Marr has pointed out the 1999 failed prosecution of Moti had "serious weaknesses" as disclosed by court documents in Vanuatu, with a strong implication that there remains no case to answer:

The statements she made over the next four months were in English, though it appears she only spoke French. None was in her own writing. None was sworn.

The basic story does not change from statement to statement, but details are contradictory. Others appear fanciful.
She claimed he had three testicles, but Port Vila GP Dr Frank Spooner would later examine Moti and concluded he had two.
The statements present a number of other difficulties for any prosecution of Moti. Dates are changed; at one stage she withdrew her allegations entirely, then renewed them a few weeks later, saying her previous statement was "not of my own free will".
In several statements she described being beaten and raped by Moti, but in others that she loved him. "I wanted to say that I love Julian Moti very much," she stated in March 1998. "He is a reach (rich) man he can take me anywhere I wanted and this is my belief of my future with Julian because he is so kind"^[3]

The defence counsel of Mr Moti in the 1999 case described the Vanuatu prosecution as “disgraceful”, expressing the view that : “Thisfwas an abysmal investigation involving a concoted story, tainted and unsworn statements followed by a completely unmeritorious prosecution.”

Why then has Australia decided to prosecute Mr Moti in August 2006 in relation to the same matters that were finally dealt with seven years earlier in Vanuatu? There is now substantial evidence that the Australian Government has acted for the most base political reasons, that is Australia saw Mr Moti as a valuable pawn to change the Solomon Islands Government. Mr Moti had drafted the terms of reference for an independent enquiry into the April riots in Honiara, an enquiry which Australian Prime Minister John Howard and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer bitterly opposed.

Moti has had his position of Attorney-General suspended by the Public Service Commission of the Solomon Islands in light of the charges made in Australia.^[4]

Moti claims that his life was threatened, so that he sought sanctuary in the Solomon Islands High Commission in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea for a week [2] He was then taken by a PNG defence plane to Solomon Islands where he was arrested by officers of RAMSI on his arrival in Munda, [[Western Province (Solomon Islands)|Western Province].

The Australian government has insisted that in its pursuit of Moti there is no political agenda with respect to ongoing issues between it and the Solomons government of Manasseh Sogavare but in October of 2006 the offices of the Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands were raided by federal police investigating the potential link between Moti's illegal escape from Papua New Guinea as he was awaiting extradition to face child-sex charges in Australia. The Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands, Manasseh Sogavare, has faced much criticism from the Australian government for his refusal to allow the extradition of Moti. ^[5] Sogavare and the Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Michael Somare, consider that the Australian Government has broken their domestic laws and international law in its pursuit of Mr Moti. They have resisted the bullying behavior of the financial powerhouse, Australia.