By Eamonn Duff
FORMER Guantanamo Bay inmate David Hicks has enlisted legal experts to finally have his terrorism conviction quashed and may appeal to US President Barack Obama for a pardon.
In the three years since his release, the former US military detainee has married and had a full-time job, but sources close to Hicks have told The Sunday Age that only when his conviction has been overturned will he truly feel free.
If Hicks succeeds in clearing his name he would be able to finally publish his tell-all book, which he has finished, because he would no longer be bound by laws that prevent people profiting from their crimes.
Co-director of the Sydney Centre for International Law, associate professor Ben Saul, confirmed he is assisting Hicks, and said an approach would be made to President Obama.
''While I cannot speak for him personally, I think any reasonable person locked up in Guantanamo for six years and subjected to an unfair trial process and facing every likelihood of being convicted on a retrospective charge would have pleaded guilty to get out of there,'' Professor Saul said.
Hicks, who turns 36 next month, was arrested by Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan in December 2001 after he undertook military training in al-Qaeda-linked camps. Several months later, he was transferred to Guantanamo where he spent the next five years in isolated detention.
In March 2007, a pre-trial agreement saw him plead guilty to a single, newly created charge of ''providing material support for terrorism''. That conviction paved the way for an emotional return to Australia, where he served a further seven months in Adelaide's Yatala prison before being released in December 2007. Questions have been raised about the conditions under which Hicks signed the confession.
Professor Saul said Hicks had been closely monitoring developments in the United States since President Obama said earlier this year that the military commission was fatally flawed.
"There's ongoing litigation in the US so that will eventually provide a definitive legal answer about whether US courts see it as retrospective or not. That's one avenue that David will wait to hear about. If all goes well, it gives him a pretty good argument to go to the US President and ask for a pardon.''
George Williams, a public law expert from the University of New South Wales, said he expected Hicks' conviction would be found null and void, and then overturned. A spokesman for Mr Hicks' said that he still lived with the residual effects of torture but ''having the truth … come to light has been an important step in the healing process.''