by BINOY KAMPMARK
The Five Eyes arrangement between the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand has always resembled a segregated, clandestine club. Focused on the sharing of intelligence between countries of supposedly like mind, it has shown that even its own citizens cannot be guaranteed protection from the zeal of surveillance.
In recent years, the club has become a font of other intentions, nudging beyond the group’s original remit. Since 2013, the intelligence alliance has seen more ministerial consultations between the countries. In 2014, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott openly mentioned the partnership’s existence on national radio. “It’s been around for some six decades and under this arrangement there is already very, very full and complete sharing.” Two years later, it appeared in the Australian Defence White Paper with explicit enthusiasm. The authors noted that Australia’s membership of the group supplied it “with information superiority and intelligence cooperation that is a vital input to our defence planning.”
In 2020, meetings taking place between the five countries, notably at the Defence, Foreign Affairs and Treasury level, were officially identified as “Five Eyes”. In May that year, the defence ministers from all five countries accepted a broader role for all in not only dealing with shared security challenges but “advance their shared values of democracy, freedom and respect for human rights.”
This move struck Ben Scott of the Lowy Institute as both mistaken and even counterproductive. “It unnecessarily limits their membership and risks blurring the critical distinction between intelligence and policy.” Well and good that cooperation should take place on a certain level (Scott approves, for instance, of those cases where “intelligence insights” between the powers can yield fruit) but any international coalition worth its constructive salt needed to be “as broad as possible.”
With the Five Eyes ever trained on the ambitions of China, its members have chosen to speak with one voice on such matters as human rights. This has had the distorting effect of assuming that the five states all have identical concerns in their dealings with Beijing.
In November last year, the foreign ministers from the five issued a joint statement on Hong Kong: “Following the imposition of the National Security Law and postponement of September’s Legislative Council elections, this decision further undermines Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy and rights and freedoms.” The actions constituted “a clear breach of its international obligations under the legally binding, UN-registered Sino-British Joint Declaration.”
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