In response to the UK’s grooming gang scandal, where Pakistani men raped and pimped young white girls, some as young as 11, Elon Musk posted on X on 5 January 2025: “There must be justice for the hundreds of thousands of little British girls who were mercilessly targeted for gang rape ...”
If the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), a United Nations-supported NGO, had its way, there would be no justice for these children, as the rape of children would no longer be a crime. Writing in The American Spectator, Francis P. Sempa explained the ICJ’s March 2023 report, ‘The 8 March Principles for a Human Rights-Based Approach to Criminal Law Proscribing Conduct Associated with Sex, Reproduction, Drug Use, HIV, Homelessness and Poverty’, as follows:
The report expressly calls for the decriminalization and normalization of sex between adults and ‘consenting’ minors … There may be nothing that is more deviant and more destructive than adults who sexually abuse minors. U.S. federal law and most state laws severely punish adult offenders who sexually exploit minors … the ICJ report makes no distinction between 17-year-olds and 10-year-olds … The list of endorsers and supporters of the ICJ report includes judges and justices from many countries, law professors from Canada and the United States, human rights lawyers, UN officials, and others.
That so many ‘eminent’ jurists and lawyers endorse and support the ICJ report means that, in the immortal words of Richard Weaver, ‘we approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without means to measure our descent’.
The Secretary-General of the Australian Section of the International Commission of Jurists, the late David Bitel, who was also the President of the Refugee Council of Australia, was raping vulnerable young migrant men and travelling to Asian countries to sexually abuse children. After Bitel was arrested and committed to stand trial for raping six men (one was my client) from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal, and an additional 21 sexual assault offences, The Sydney Morning Herald reported:
On about the fourth time they met, according to Rojas, Bitel threw an open manila envelope full of photographs onto the desk between them. Some spilled out and Rojas recalls being chilled.
‘A few pictures came out from the envelope. I didn't touch them, I just saw a few pictures on the desk of a few boys, young kids on a boat and in a bedroom’, Rojas told Fairfax Media.
He mentioned Thailand, Bangladesh and India. He said he goes often [on trips] and he do all these things ... He was on a bed and there were a few boys on the bed.
Rojas said he was shocked and confused. ‘I was applying to stay in Australia. I was thinking, should I report this and then lose my residency’?
Rojas said Bitel locked the door and told him, ‘If you don't want to pay for your case then you should do as I say’. Bitel tried to grab him, Rojas pushed him away and fled.
Before he could stand trial, Bitel died from stomach cancer in Sydney in August 2016. A detective informed one of Bitel’s rape victims, Imran Khan from Pakistan, that the police estimated that Bitel had more than 500 victims.
In 2008, two of Bitel’s rape victims lodged complaints with the NSW Legal Services Commissioner, who considers complaints against lawyers in the state. No action was taken. The Legal Services Commissioner at the time was also the Chairman of International Commission of Jurists, Australian Section.
After Bitel was arrested in December 2012 for raping his six clients and charged with 21 additional sexual assault offences, when renewing his annual practising certificate in the years 2013-16, Bitel declared he was a ‘fit and proper person to practice law’ and the four successive Law Society of NSW Presidents agreed, signing off his annual practising certificate giving him unrestricted access to clients.
A month after his death, there was a memorial toast at an International Bar Association dinner at The Caucus Room Brasserie in Washington, D.C.: “David very very sadly died after a long battle with cancer …” Bitel’s rape victims, nor the children he had sexually abused in Asia, were mentioned.
In 2004, Bitel’s local contact in Dhaka, Bangladesh, told a visiting New Zealand lawyer that Bitel would ask for 10-year-old boys to sexually abuse. Upon his return to Auckland, the lawyer reported this to the police. Bitel was subsequently arrested in Dhaka, but released when he contacted the Bangladesh Prime Minister’s office.
On 4 December 2008, I was visiting the Bangladesh provincial city of Sylhet. Mr Zakaria Ahmed, an ex-Sydney cook, who now lives in Germany and was visiting his home district, came to see me. Mr Ahmed said that during a trip to Dhaka, Bitel had been surrounded by a group of Bangladeshi men, angry at his sexual abuse of children during his frequent visits.
On 5 March 2025, the White House issued a statement about President Trump: “America’s children are our future — and he’ll never stop fighting for their right to a healthy, productive upbringing and childhood”.
The International Commission of Jurists has an opposite view: it sees children as a resource to be harvested and sexually exploited. Its late Australian Secretary-General Bitel was a leader in his field.
