UPDATE - Australia passes new counter-terrorism law

UPDATES TO CHANGE BYLINE, ADD RESPONSE

By Jill Fraser

MELBOURNE (AA) - Australia passed new counter-terrorism measures Thursday that allow convicted terrorists to be kept in jail once their sentences expire if they continue to be deemed a risk.

The bill followed a call by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull earlier this year for laws to be strengthened following high-profile terror attacks worldwide.

"In the wake of Orlando, Nice and other terrorist incidents as well as our own experience of 16 counter-terrorism operations since September 2014, resulting in the charging of 44 persons, we cannot afford for a moment to be complacent," Malcolm Turnbull told a press conference July 27.

The legislation allows Attorney-General George Brandis to apply for an extension of a sentence 12 months before it expires, rather than six months as originally proposed.

On Thursday, the Australian network ABC reported Brandis as telling parliament that risks posed by individual prisoners would need to be evaluated on admissible evidence, rather than legal definitions.

"It could be always asserted that there is a reasonable doubt as to whether a prisoner convicted of a serious terrorism offence would be pose an unacceptable level of risk," he said.

"The criminal standard of proof is in fact a very rigid standard and it is just not apt to apply to a decision that involves a degree of evaluation of this kind."

Australia has been engaged in efforts to increase its anti-terror measures in recent years.

Among other new legislation, it has banned citizens from traveling to Mosul in northern Iraq and Syria’s Raqqa province -- unless they have a "legitimate purpose" for being there -- and also passed legislation to strip dual nationals of citizenship if they are convicted or suspected of terrorism offenses.

The laws were vehemently opposed by the Greens and Liberal Democrats, with Senator David Leyonhjelm calling them an unacceptable erosion of civil liberties.

"We should not be able to effectively impose life imprisonment on someone who was not originally sentenced to life imprisonment," the Courier Mail quoted Leyonhjelm as saying.

"We could be 100 per cent safe from reoffending by locking up every prisoner for life, but that's not what we do."