Above Photo: Freed socialist political prisoner in Australia, Chan Han Choi, hours after his sentencing judgement was handed down does something that he has been prevented from doing for over three and a half years: take a walk in a park.
Choi is now busy seeking employment as well as accommodation – following through on an application for public housing, given that it is almost impossible for ex-prisoners to obtain tenancies from private landlords.
Photo credit: Trotskyist Platform

SOCIALIST POLITICAL PRISONER IN AUSTRALIA
HIT WITH OUTRAGEOUSLY HEAVY SENTENCE

But After Three Years in Prison and Eight Months of House Arrest

CHAN HAN CHOI
FINALLY GETS HIS FREEDOM

23 July 2021: Chan Han Choi is finally free. This left-wing political prisoner in Australia had been imprisoned in especially harsh conditions for almost three years from December 2017. Then for the last eight and a half months, Choi has been under house arrest on bail. Today, Choi was sentenced to 3 years and 6 months imprisonment. It is absolutely outrageous that he should receive any punishment for what he did let alone such a tough sentence! However, given that this sentence is less than the aggregate time that he has already been jailed and under house arrest, the 62 year-old South Korean-born, Australian citizen is at long last free.

Chan Han Choi was the victim of an intense Cold War witch-hunt. He was largely imprisoned for his political sympathy for socialistic North Korea and his opposition to the cruel United Nations economic sanctions on that country. Nominally, the charges that Choi was sentenced over were that he had tried to broker deals to help the people of North Korea evade economic sanctions. However, if Choi had been sentenced fairly, even under the blatantly unfair laws enforcing the killer sanctions, he would have only received a small fine. This is because his “offending” was on the very low-end of the scale. None of the deals that Choi tried to broker ever went through. No goods or technology were exchanged and no money ever changed hands. Additionally, if the evidence had been looked at impartially, it would be apparent that in all the five proscribed trades Choi tried to broker, Choi himself cancelled the negotiations well before he was arrested.

Even the judge who despicably knocked back Choi’s second bail bid alluded
in his December 2019 bail judgement to the possibility that Choi would not be hit with a jail sentence. In the judgement, Justice Harrison conceded that: “… there is a possibly of a fine as a complete substitute for the s 11 offences, if he were convicted or pleaded guilty. The same position applies to the other offences with which he is charged.” Moreover, that was when Choi was facing eight charges. Today he was being sentenced on just two of the charges with both the totally bogus WMD charges and a coal export deal to Vietnam charge completely dropped and three of the other charges rolled into one. Therefore, there was even more reason for Choi to get a non-custodial sentence than there was when Harrison made his bail judgment.

It is telling that at the sentencing hearing, the Crown Prosecutors were unable to provide one single victim impact statement. That is because there are no victims to the “crimes” that Chan Han Choi was sentenced for! Indeed, if Choi had gone further in his “offences” and actually brokered the deals to their successful conclusion then there would have only been beneficiaries – not victims. How many lives would have been saved or made easier in North Korea had the people of North Korea been able to receive badly needed hard currency from the export deals that Choi, for a period, tried to organise?

The actual reason that Choi received such a big jail sentence today instead of a small fine is because the court politically discriminated against Choi for his pro-DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, that is North Korea) sympathies. Indeed, for the last more than three and half years, Chan Han Choi has been subjected to political persecution from a range of Australian state agencies ranging from the courts to the Commonwealth DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions), the AFP (Australian Federal Police), ASIO, “Corrective Services” NSW (the prison system), Legal Aid and Justice Health (the state agency responsible for providing medical care for prisoners).

The judge did not divide today’s judgement into a non-parole period and a period that Choi could be released on parole due to Choi having already completed the entire period of sentence. If this had not been the case and Choi had been released on bail much earlier and under normal conditions of bail then typically the non-parole period would be about 60% of the entire sentence. That would mean that today’s sentence would have likely been divided into about two years imprisonment without parole and then a further eighteen months under parole – parole which is typically nowhere as harsh as the house arrest conditions that Choi faced for the last eight and a half months. That means that Choi ended up enduring as much as a year longer in prison than he would have had he been released on bail earlier and then a further eight and a half months in much more severe conditions than typical parole. Thus, while today’s sentencing judgement is blatantly biased and outrageously severe, the fact that several judges repeatedly denied Choi bail for nearly three years prior to trial is even more despicable. The Commonwealth DPP and AFP had opposed Choi’s bail bids, in good part, on the claim that Choi’s “offending” was objectively more serious because of Choi’s political loyalty to the DPRK. In other words, they claimed that Choi’s political sympathy for the DPRK made his “offending” more serious than if he had other political sympathies or if he was purely motivated by personal economic gain. This is crystal clear, pure Cold War McCarthyism, where a person is treated worse by the law and denied rights accorded to others – in this case the right to bail before trial – on the basis of their support for socialistic states.

In denying Choi bail until he had spent nearly three years in prison, the judges also accepted another Cold War claim made by the Commonwealth DPP and AFP: that if Choi was granted bail, North Korean or even Chinese agents would descend upon Australia and secretly spirit Choi away to North Korea. This was not a case of the Crown prosecutors and AFP officers making wild claims because they have watched too many American action movies. It was even worse than that: they knew themselves that their claims were rubbish! This is proven by the conduct of the police since Choi was finally granted bail last November. The Commonwealth DPP and the AFP insisted that if Choi were granted bail, a bail condition should be that Choi would be required to answer the door of his bail address should a police officer knock at the door. However, in the eight and a half months that Choi has been on bail, not once did the police check to see that Choi was keeping to his house arrest. In other words, the state knew that Choi had no intention of fleeing bail and that no North Korean or Chinese agents were going to come and rescue him.

A Compassionate, Intelligent Person Motivated by
Humanitarian Concern for the People of North Korea

In February, Choi accepted a plea deal in which the Commonwealth DPP dropped some of its blatantly false, hyped-up charges. Choi in turn accepted that he had tried to help the people of North Korea organise exports of iron, coal, instrumentation and arms in violation of UN sanctions that ban almost all of North Korea’s exports. Choi had also tried to help North Korea import petrol which is also restricted by the murderous sanctions.

The trade that Choi was trying to help organise is very similar to the trade that Australia engages in. But the people of North Korea are cruelly prevented from carrying out such trade. The resulting shortages and lack of hard currency needed to import food, medicine, medical equipment and agricultural machinery causes immense suffering to North Korea’s people. An independent international report prepared by Western-based medical and aid workers titled, The Human Costs and Gendered Impact of Sanctions on North Korea, found that the UN sanctions had caused the deaths of thousands of people in North Korea – mostly children – in 2018 alone. It is out of deep humanitarian concern for the people of North Korea that Choi tried to help her people trade. At his sentencing hearing last week, Choi, while making clear that he was totally committed to, from now on, following all of Australian laws, bravely continued to expose the unjust nature of the sanctions on North Korea. He explained that he would, from now on, oppose the sanctions through protest and other legal means. 

Chan Han Choi sought no personal gain from his efforts to help the people of North Korea to trade. Although Choi brokered some pretty big commodities export contracts for North Korea in the period when ever-tightening sanctions had not yet proscribed such trade, Choi lived an austere life. When he was arrested, he lived in a modest rented apartment, owned no property, had no car and had just $6,000 in savings. At the time of his arrest, Choi was working as a hospital cleaner. Choi is really only “guilty” of doing very understandable acts. He should not have spent one second behind bars and should never have been charged in the first place!

The real criminals in this matter are the imperialist rulers who repeatedly arm twisted the world to acquiesce to successively more severe sanctions on the DPRK. Chief of these were the leaders of the United States. But they were enthusiastically supported by the Australian, Japanese, South Korean and British regimes. Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George Bush, Scott Morrison, Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Shinzo Abe: these are biggest criminals in this matter. They have helped enact sanctions on the people of North Korea that are an indirect form of mass murder. The ASIO and Australian Federal Police officers, prosecutors and judges involved in Choi’s persecution – and, thus, in enforcing these sanctions – also bear some responsibility for the death and suffering that these sanctions are causing.

For three and half years, the AFP and Commonwealth DPP pushed the line that Choi was motivated by “loyalty to the DPRK” and a higher “patriotic duty.” They said that he was an “economic agent of the DPRK.” They then opposed bail successfully for nearly three years in good part on the basis of Choi’s “loyalty to the DPRK.” Yet around three weeks ago, the Crown did a 180 degree U-turn. They started claiming that Choi was instead partly motivated by personal profit (and when that claim was exposed as false, created a really bizarre theory that Choi just wanted to deal in arms for the sake of it). The judge, in part, bought into this “personal profit” rubbish. In today’s judgement, although she accepted the truth that Choi was motivated by a desire “to assist the people of North Korea”, she also claimed that he was partly motivated by personal financial gain. The idea that Choi was seeking personal financial gain by trying to breach the sanctions is, of course, ridiculous! If one was really motivated by personal financial gain, trying to act as a broker for North Korea, especially for a person living in a country with a rabidly anti-communist regime like Australia, is the worst course to take. The sanctions on North Korea are extremely tightly policed by the U.S., Japan, Australia and other imperialist powers. Moreover, any broker on the North Korean side could never make much money from such trades because North Korea can only entice potential buyers to break the sanctions and accept North Korean produce if they offer buyers a much lower price than the world market price. If someone in Australia really wanted to make money from brokering illegal trades they would simply be a drug dealer, which Choi is definitely not. Furthermore, in the period before the sanctions reached their current level of severity, Choi focused on putting people in touch with each other so that they could themselves arrange deals – which were then legal – between themselves; so in these cases no money changed hands through Choi and, thus, he could not be making personal gain from this work.

The sudden attempt by the Crown – in part backed up by the judge – to paint Choi as someone partly motivated by personal gain is a crude, last minute, attempt by the regime to partly de-politicise a case that they have politicised from the very beginning. It is a realisation by the regime that their Cold War imprisonment of pro-DPRK political prisoner Chan Han Choi has done them a lot of political harm and now they want to do their best to show that Choi was never a political prisoner and … his prosecution was never all that much about politics after all!

Given that the Australian ruling are doing their best to obscure what actually drove Chan Han Choi and – more importantly for them – what he represents, let’s clarify who Chan Han Choi really is and what motivated his “offending” actions. Chan Han Choi is a very compassionate and polite human being. He was brought up in capitalist South Korea and then has lived the last 34 years of his life in Australia. For most of his life, Choi bought the anti-DPRK propaganda that he was fed from childhood. However, from the mid-noughties, Choi began to do his own research on the question. Then in 2007 he made his first trip to North Korea. Like many people who go to North Korea with a truly open mind and without the expressed aim of themselves adding to anti-DPRK hostility, Choi really liked North Korean society. Choi fell in love with the egalitarianism of a society where he found that workers seem to have more rights at work than factory directors, where people’s interrelationships are not driven by money and where the warmth of friendship between ordinary people is very evident. At the same time, Choi saw economic hardships caused by the effects of sanctions, economic blockade and U.S.-led military pressure – the latter forcing North Korea to divert considerable resources to self-defence in order to avoid her people meeting the same fate as Iraq’s people. So he resolved to do what he could do to help North Korea’s economy and, thereby, improve the life of her people. Choi volunteered himself as an unofficial trade representative for the DPRK’s public sector enterprises that dominate her economy (note that the label thrown around by the AFP, the Crown Prosecutors and the media that Choi is an “economic agent” of North Korea is deliberately intended to make something so very benign as being a trade representative sound sinister). Choi had considerable success in assisting North Korea to accomplish trade deals, deals which at the time were legal. Bank records and E-mails hacked into by the police after they arrested Choi showed that in 2008 alone, Choi organised two export deals for the sale of North Korean coal and pig iron respectively that were together worth $US1.3 million. Later Choi helped to put North Korean exporting firms together with contacts in China, South Korea and elsewhere so that the respective parties could themselves arrange deals. Partly through the efforts of people like Choi and even more so through the work of North Korea’s own people and with the help of increased trade with socialistic China’s booming economy, by the time ten years had passed since Choi’s first trip to North Korea, North Korea was actually able to better feed all her people than the majority of other developing countries in Asia. However, Choi watched with horror in 2016 and 2017 as successively more draconian sanctions were imposed on North Korea. He rightly feared that North Korea’s people would now have to endure even more hardships than those which he saw in his early trips to North Korea in the mid-late noughties. So in the latter half of 2017, Choi made a renewed push to broker trade deals for North Korea’s people. However, by then the goal posts had been moved. The deals that he had brokered previously, which had once been legal, were now proscribed by the sanctions. Worried about the plight of the people and society that he so cared about, Choi pushed through with some brokering efforts. But seeing the stringency of the imperialist policing of sanctions, Choi pulled back and cancelled the deals. This is the sum total of what Choi’s “offending” consists of and what drove it. In a fair society Choi would be given medals and awards for compassion and courage. But here he was demonised and thrown into prison.

Choi was Demonised and Persecuted to “Justify”
the Capitalist Rulers’ Cold War Drive

The obvious reason for the severity of the Australian capitalist state’s persecution of Choi is that this state is hell-bent on enforcing the sanctions on North Korea. The imperialist powers want to use these crippling sanctions to crush socialistic rule in North Korea and thus undermine socialistic rule also in North Korea’s neighbour and ally, the Peoples Republic of China, the world’s largest workers state. Although socialistic rule in North Korea and China is deformed by bureaucratic privileges and a lack of real workers democracy – and in China by the presence of a capitalist exploiting class (although fortunately one which does not hold state power as in the capitalist countries) – the existence of workers states in these countries is not only a massive advance for the working class masses but a serious challenge to the interests of imperialist ruling classes. Socialistic rule in the likes of China, North Korea and Cuba prevents those countries from being turned into giant sweatshops for Western multinationals to exploit the way that workers in, say, the Philippines, Indonesia and Bangladesh are. It is also an example to the toiling masses in the capitalist neo-colonial countries that could inspire them to have “bad thoughts” about throwing off their local exploiters and their American, Australian, British and Japanese overlords. Moreover, the mere existence of workers states abroad incites the greatest fear of the capitalist rulers in Australia, India, the U.S. and Brazil: that the working class masses in their own countries will see that it is possible for them to also make their own anti-capitalist revolutions and take over power.

However, the persecution of Choi was not only about – and perhaps not even mainly about – enforcing the sanctions on the DPRK. When Choi was arrested it was accompanied by a massive attempt on the part of
then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, as well as the AFP and the mainstream media to hype up a supposed North Korean threat. As well as listing the items that Choi actually really did try to help North Korea trade – like petrol, coal and iron – the regime initially hit Choi with completely bogus charges that he had tried to assist North Korea to export Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) technology. They even sensationally claimed that Choi was trying to organise North Korean experts to help private traders to make ICBMs to sell around the world. All these claims have now been discredited. The Commonwealth DPP had to drop their bogus WMD charges, and in the face of compelling evidence, step-by-step retreated from the claim that Choi was trying to organise the export of North Korean technology for the production of any ballistic missiles, let alone ICBMs. The judge had to concede too in today’s judgement that in relation to the arms particular of one charge, it could not be established that Choi had tried to broker any more than the export of North Korean technology for the production of MANPADs (which is what Choi had admitted all along since he accepted the plea bargain) – which are small, hand-held weapons used for shooting down low-flying military aircraft and helicopter gunships. And that is a massive difference from all the earlier hype claiming that Choi had tried to broker the export of WMD and ICBM technology!

Yet all these truly fanciful – and now discredited – claims about Choi’s activities had a purpose. Australia’s imperialist ruling class want to manufacture a “North Korea” threat in order to scare us into accepting their ever more aggressive participation in the U.S.-led Cold War drive against North Korea and her giant socialistic neighbour and ally, Red China. Moreover, the capitalist rulers want to “justify” their intensification of McCarthyist repression against supporters of socialistic states at home. Since Choi’s arrest and the escalation of the anti-China Cold War, Chinese journalists have been raided by the AFP and ASIO, Chinese international students who organised a Sydney rally in support of Red China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong were subjected to a terrifying interrogation by Australian secret police and a respected member of the Indochinese-Chinese community in Melbourne has been charged under the “foreign interference” laws. Last year, even a NSW upper house MP, Shaoquett Moselmane, was hit with an intimidating 16-hour raid of his family home by the AFP and ASIO after merely stating the simple fact that China responded very effectively to the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the hysterical rubbish about a supposed “North Korea threat” that surrounded Choi’s arrest, the witch-hunt against those sympathetic to the PRC and the generally repressive Cold War climate have all combined to create such a national security obsession that even dissidents not involved in Cold War issues have been targeted by Australia’s increasingly authoritarian, capitalist regime. Within nine months of Choi’s arrest, whistle-blowers David McBride, Witness K and lawyer Bernard Collaery were all hit with serious charges – each for alleged “offences” committed several years earlier. Meanwhile, the same AFP that targeted these whistle-blowers and Chan Han Choi have also conducted intimidating raids against trade unions like the CFMEU. Moreover, it is undeniable that the national security obsession, in part churned up by the hysteria surrounding Choi’s December 2017 arrest, has made it easier for Australia’s rulers to be complicit in the horrendous persecution of Julian Assange by Canberra’s allies in Washington and London.

The political benefit that Australia’s capitalists gained from demonising Choi meant that the regime that serves them spent literally millions of dollars of public money on his prosecution. The resources that they unleashed against Choi included intercepting his phone calls for months prior to his arrest, unleashing dozens of police in the operation, hacking into Choi’s E-mails and bank records, enlisting numerous international and local “experts” and engaging for over three years a large legal team including a crack senior counsel, a reputed junior counsel, a high-powered senior solicitor and numerous legal researchers. Moreover, in mid-2018, two AFP officers, assisted by the U.S. FBI, went on a, at minimum two-week long, trip from one coast of the U.S. to the other to organise “experts” – mostly rabid, war-mongering neoconservatives – to assist in the prosecution of Choi. The cost of that trip alone to the public budget is estimated at $30,000 to $50,000. We do not know of how many other overseas trips AFP and ASIO officers went on to advance their prosecution of Choi. And yet while millions overall were spent on persecuting Chan Han Choi, today Australian governments have proved incapable and/or unwilling to provide adequate vaccines and virus testing capacity for the people and adequate PPE for health care and other at-risk workers resulting in a deadly COVID outbreak that has forced nearly 60% of this country’s people into lockdown.

This highlights the priorities, and indeed the fundamental nature, of Australia’s capitalist regime; a character trait that does not decisively change whether it is the Liberals, the ALP or the Greens who are warming the ministerial seats of governments. Just as telling as is the contrast between the prosecution of Choi and the failed pandemic response, in the period when the AFP was devoting huge resources to preparing Choi’s arrest and then his prosecution, they and ASIO were not conducting any surveillance whatsoever of the Australian white supremacist who murdered 51 people in the horrific March 2019 terror attack on two mosques in Christchurch. This is despite the fact that this fascist, who would go on to become Australia’s biggest single terrorist, made many threatening racist statements online. Persecuting and demonising supporters of socialistic states is a priority for the capitalist regime but stopping murdering racists is certainly not. Neither is holding finance sector corporate bigwigs to account. Thus, after Australia’s corporate regulator, ASIC, sent two briefs of evidence to the Commonwealth DPP last August about laying criminal charges against AMP for its notorious practice of charging customers fees for no service – that is, basically stealing from customers – the Commonwealth DPP last week declared that no charges would be laid after … “weighing the relevant public interest factors”! This is the very same Commonwealth DPP that ferociously spearheaded the prosecution of Chan Han Choi.

Choi Was Imprisoned Under Brutal Conditions

Choi’s many supporters are outraged at the severity of today’s sentence while at the same time being very happy that Choi is finally free. However, let us not forget how much he has suffered over the last three and a half years. Choi spent most of his time in jail in one of the Australian regime’s most notorious prison camps – Long Bay. Choi was incarcerated at the very same prison and section of the jail where, in December 2015, six racist prison guards crushed to death 26 year-old Aboriginal man, David Dungay, in circumstances very similar to the infamous racist police murder of George Floyd in the USA.

Even though Choi was not accused of any violent offence, had no prior criminal record and was not even accused of any espionage, he was imprisoned as a National Security Interest (NSI) prisoner. This meant that Choi had no access to amenities, employment opportunities or educational opportunities due to his NSI classification. Moreover, prison records show that for the first 89 days of his custody, Choi was placed in “segregated custody” which is the prison system’s understated way of saying solitary confinement. Then when friends sought to visit, Corrective Services used all sorts of tricks to ensure that the visitors were delayed four and a half months before being properly approved and notified that they could visit Choi in jail. But for the last two years of his incarceration, the authorities prevented Choi from making telephone calls to these friends. Choi was by then only allowed to telephone his wife. However, even though Choi’s English is poor, authorities prevented Choi from his speaking on the telephone to his wife in Korean. In February 2019, Corrective Services’ intelligence officers even threatened to send Choi to Goulburn Supermax prison should be speak on the phone to his wife in Korean.

Corrective Services even obstructed Choi’s lawyers from making face to face visits to him. After an initial visit, Choi’s earlier legal team was only allowed one visit to him in a 12-month period! Moreover, language interpreters were obstructed from accompanying legal visits to such an extent that Choi did not get one single face to face visit with this legal team that was actually accompanied by an interpreter until some 17 months after they first entered the matter!  

Most seriously, authorities endangered Choi’s life by repeatedly knocking back his requests to see a prison doctor as his diabetes severely deteriorated during the first eight months of 2020. Choi’s prison health records prove, as was conceded at Choi’s sentencing hearing by Dr Ette, a doctor under the pay of Justice Health, that for an eight and a half month period from mid-December 2019 to the end of August 2020, Choi, who by then was on oral diabetic medication, did not have his Blood Sugar Level (BSL) monitored even once. This is despite the fact that on the last date that his BSL was actually monitored before this period, Choi’s BSL was already too high as confirmed by Dr Ette. As a result Choi endured months of diabetic symptoms – including severe weight loss, very itchy rashes, fungal infections, urinating problems etc – with no treatment. Choi became so desperate to treat unbearably itchy skin rashes – that unknown to him at the time were diabetic-induced – that he applied on his skin the hospital grade disinfectant given to prisoners to clean their toilet bowls! By late August 2020, Choi’s diabetes was out of control. In today’s judgement, the judge conceded that “the offender was referred for ‘urgent diabetes clinical review’, which Dr Ette regarded as having become ‘urgent’ because he had not been reviewed between December 2019 and August 2020.” Indeed, Choi’s situation became so desperate that when he was finally able to see medical staff in late August 2020, he had to be given emergency doses of insulin. As his BSL swung wildly, Choi was at immediate risk of brain damage, heart failure and strokes. Moreover, the only reason that Choi finally received treatment at the end of last August was because he had weeks before (with help to write in English from fellow prisoners) sent a strongly worded protest letter to Justice Health, which his supporters then published online, saying that they are “indirectly trying to murder me” by denying him medical care. The UN states that: “The intentional withholding of medical treatment from persons in places of detention or in other State institutions such as orphanages or from persons injured by an act attributable to public officials falls within the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on torture” (https://www.bak.gv.at/en/Downloads/files/UNO/UNO_Folter_Konvention.pdf).  In short, under the UN definition of torture, socialist political prisoner Chan Han Choi was tortured by the Australian capitalist regime for a period of several months in 2020.

Chan Han Choi’s Growing Number of Supporters

Today, Chan Han Choi expressed his deepest appreciation for all the people who have supported him. Everyone who supported the campaign to free Choi should be congratulated. We acknowledge the groups that supported the nine united-front street rallies and marches held in solidarity with Choi, including Anti-War West Sydney, the Australia-DPRK Friendship Society, the Communist Party of Australia – Western Sydney branch, Communist Party of Australia – Wollongong Branch, Aust-DPRK Solidarity and ourselves in Trotskyist Platform who are proud to have initiated this united-front campaign. Other groups including the Social Justice Network, the Lebanese Communist Party, the Communist League (publishers of the Militant newspaper) and the Irish Republican socialist group, the James Connolly Association, also joined in the campaign at various stages. These actions have galvanised others to show solidarity with Choi. When a protest march was conducted by Chan Han Choi’s supporters in Chester Hill last December, right at the very heart of Sydney’s multiracial working class southwest that has been so vilified by the ruling class during this recent COVID upsurge, large numbers of people tooted their horns and waved in support of the protest. Moreover, in recent months, additional groups on the Left came on board the struggle to defend Choi and issued articles demanding Choi’s freedom including Socialist Alliance through its Green Left Weekly publication and the Melbourne-based leftist website, Class Conscious. Meanwhile, significant sections of the Korean community in Sydney swung behind Choi. This was reflected in the fair coverage of the case by the main Korean language community newspaper in Australia, Hanho Daily, whose online articles have received comments that are mostly in support of Choi. Meanwhile, the most popular online Chinese language news sites in Sydney, like 今日悉尼 (Sydney Today), have covered protests in support of Choi sympathetically. Meanwhile, support for Choi has spread internationally. In Russia, articles and documentaries in support of Choi produced by a Russian-speaking journalist in Australia have gone viral in both online media and social media. Meanwhile, from New Zealand to Greece to Britain and to the U.S., groups have declared their solidarity with Choi and published articles and statements condemning his persecution.

All this growing support for Choi and the work of Choi’s supporters in exposing the injustice of his persecution meant that Australia’s capitalist rulers were paying a significant political price for every day that they continued to persecute Chan Han Choi. The capitalist regime’s claims to stand for “rule of law” and “freedom of conscience” were being starkly exposed as a fraud and their ability to meddle abroad under the guise of “human rights” was being damaged. In the end, what Choi’s supporters managed to do was to take a situation that what was heading toward an extremely, extremely horrific injustice and divert that into being just a plain horrific injustice. That may not sound like much of an achievement but to Choi it meant the difference between being imprisoned for ten to fifteen years as the regime threatened when they initially arrested him with cruel fanfare and the three years that Choi finally ended up enduring.

Moreover, the campaign to free Choi has had another important achievement. It has raised the consciousness of many people about the cruelty and injustice of the UN sanctions on North Korea. Out of Choi’s suffering, his continued outspoken condemnation of the unjust nature of the sanctions and the efforts of his supporters, the opposition to the anti-DPRK sanctions within Australia is stronger than at any previous time. Furthermore, the struggle to free Choi was implicitly a struggle against Cold War McCarthyist witch-hunting more generally. The campaign to free Choi was indeed the first organised push back against the ruling class’ McCarthyist offensive that has swept this country over the last few years.

However, the work of Choi’s supporters remains unfinished. We are, of course, delighted that Choi is finally free, while being furious at the severity of the sentence handed down today and, indeed, angry that any punishment was decreed at all. But the immediate cause of Choi’s imprisonment, the crippling UN sanctions on the people of North Korea, remains. We need to re-double our efforts to oppose these sanctions. We can take encouragement that many countries are now openly calling for an easing of these sanctions – most notably China. Countries are also starting to vote with their feet and not police the sanctions, which is allowing some small amount of precious trade with North Korea to take place, thus saving many lives. An international movement demanding the lifting of the sanctions will encourage those countries now opposing the sanctions to more boldly take such a stance.

Our work in opposing McCarthyist witch-hunting is also far from over. Chan Han Choi has been the biggest single victim of Cold War witch-hunting but he certainly is not the only one. We must defend the large, pro-Red China section of the Chinese community against the hysterical attacks that they are facing for their sympathy for socialistic China. We must all stand by others being witch-hunted for similar views. We also need to defend the indirect victims of McCarthyism – those whose persecution has been indirectly facilitated by the national security obsession created by the new Cold War conditions. We must demand the dropping of all charges against David McBride and Bernard Collaery and the quashing of the sentence against Witness K. And we must call for immediate freedom for another Australian political prisoner, Julian Assange.

Most fundamentally, we must seek to dig out the root cause of Choi’s persecution – the Cold War drive of the U.S, Australian and other capitalist rulers against socialistic China and her DPRK neighbour and ally. This Cold War drive is against the interests of more than 90% of Australia and the world’s population because it attacks states based on the public ownership system that favours working class people. That is why we must urgently defend the workers states in North Korea and China as well as in Cuba, Vietnam and Laos. That means that we must resist the propaganda campaign of lies over “human rights” that is unleashed against these socialistic states.

With Choi no longer under threat of being sent back to prison, one injustice to do with Long Bay Prison “Hospital” is over. But another one has no closure. The family of Aboriginal man, David Dungay, who was killed by racist guards at that very same prison have still not received any justice. All those people who stood by Choi must urgently support the Dungay family’s struggle for justice and the fight for justice for all victims of racist state terror against Aboriginal people.

Everyone who participated in the campaign to free Chan Han Choi must draw lessons from the campaign and from his treatment. And the key lesson is that in Australia – as in all capitalist states – the police, courts, prisons, army and bureaucracy do not exist to serve the people as a whole but were created and are maintained to enforce the interests of the wealthy capitalist ruling class against the interests of the working class masses. Many people who participated in this campaign have acquired an enhanced understanding of this truth. We need to spread this understanding widely. Every struggle against injustice within capitalist society – whether it be the struggle against workplace exploitation, the fight for workers’ job security, the fight to stop the sell-off of public housing, the fight to defend Aboriginal people and people of colour against racist attack, the struggle for women’s liberation and more – can become powerful to the extent that those in struggle truly understand that the institutions of the current capitalist state can never be their allies. So out of the cruelty of the three and half years of suffering endured by Choi, let us work hard to spread this class conscious understanding as we build the basis for the fight for a future socialist Australia.