Jail for Victorian taxi driver who covered camera before raping female passenger
A Victorian taxi driver who covered his camera before raping a female passenger and asking if she “liked it” has been jailed for at least five years and three months.
Shibu Paul, 48, picked up the 23year-old woman in south-east Melbourne early one morning in June 2018.
She had been out drinking with friends before an off-duty Australian Federal Police officer hailed a taxi for her.
Paul reached back and touched the woman’s chest as she was slumped in the back seat and then covered the taxi’s camera.
He pulled over and touched her chest again before telling her to get in the front seat to put her address in his GPS.
The driver digitally raped her, asked her if she “liked it”.
Paul then repeatedly asked if she was happy before driving the 23-yearold to her parents’ house.
He asked for a kiss on arrival but she ran inside.
Paul on Wednesday faced the Victorian County Court, where he was sentenced to a total of seven years and six months in prison for rape and four counts of sexual assault.
The father-of-two must spend at least five years and three months in prison before being eligible for parole.
Judge Claire Quin said members of the public, particularly women, are “entitled to feel safe in a taxi after a night out”.
“She was fearful from the time you first reached over to her,” Quin told Paul.
“You were aware of her vulnerable state and took advantage for your own sexual pleasure.”
In a statement to the court the woman said all her friends were “moving forward with their exciting lives”.
“I feel that my life got stuck there that night – I really miss the spark I had for life,” she said.
Paul, who will be placed on the serious sex offenders list, has already served 75 days in pre-sentence detention.
• In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/ internl.html
chaired this year by China.
In the email, Anderson said Bahrain, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Ethiopia, Hungary, Mali, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, had indicated “they would like to co-author/co-sponsor” an amendment supporting Australia’s position. In a document tabled to the committee early Wednesday those countries, as well as Russia and Spain, are listed as backing Australia.
Anderson said Australia believed the level of support would “send a good message about consensus and that the committee would not need to spend a lot of time discussing [the reef]”.
The amendment, which was submitted by Bahrain, would require a Unesco monitoring mission to the reef and allow Australia to report back to the committee by December 2022. Any consideration for placing the reef on the danger list would be pushed back until at least 2023.
Last week, the Guardian revealed Australia had won the support of oilrich Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to cosponsor “amendments” to be put to the committee that would see a decision delayed until the 2023 meeting of the committee.
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Australia has argued Unesco did not follow the normal process because it did not carry out a monitoring mission before making its recommendation. Australia also argued the decision had been politicised.
Environment groups, prominent Australians and a lineup of international figures from the worlds of entertainment, science and conservation have all backed Unesco’s call.
Senior Unesco officials have repeatedly rejected claims due process had not been followed and said an “in danger” listing was a chance to rally the world to the reef’s plight.
Since the World Heritage Committee last considered the reef in 2015, corals across the world’s biggest reef system have been hit by mass bleaching in 2016, 2017 and 2020.
In the email, sent to ambassadors from more than 20 countries, Anderson supplied a scientific summary from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (Aims) which, she said, had found “widespread recovery of coral at key sites across the property”.
Record-breaking ocean temperatures over the Queensland reef in February 2020 led to the most widespread bleaching event on record. But since then, conditions have been benign, the Aims report said.
But the report said rising coral coverage was thanks to fast-growing species that were susceptible to storms and coral-eating starfish – and would probably be hit in the next bleaching event.
The minister has been flying in one of the RAAF’s three new Dassault Falcon 7X planes. Charges for previous ministerial flights on the same aircraft suggest the trips cost in the region of $4,200 an hour.
Last Thursday, the government hosted ambassadors from 13 countries and the EU for a day of snorkelling on Agincourt Reef, off Port Douglas, with reef envoy Warren Entsch.
Ley was accompanied on the Europe trip by the chief executive of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Josh Thomas.
Publicly available flight logs showed the RAAF plane crisscrossed Europe for meetings with members of the 21country world heritage committee.
The plane landed in Budapest last Monday and then flew to Paris. On Wednesday, the plane flew to Madrid and back. On Friday, there was a return trip to Sarajevo.
The jet then flew to the Indian Ocean nation of the Maldives, via Oman, on Monday, where Ley met with the country’s environment minister and the country’s special climate change envoy.
A spokesperson for the minister said there was “strong appreciation of the minister’s concerns in regard to the absence of process from Unesco”.
“The meetings included constructive and cordial conversations, including two with the ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to Unesco,” they said.
Australia had a strong relationship with all countries in the world heritage system, the spokesperson said, “as we work together to protect the world’s cultural and natural heritage”.
Imogen Zethoven, a consultant on world heritage for the Australian Marine Conservation Society who has also been briefing countries on the reef, said: “The trip by minister Ley is all about politics ahead of conservation.”
“The government wants to defer any decision about the Great Barrier Reef until after the next election. I hope committee members can see through this,” she said.
Richard Leck, head of oceans at WWF-Australia, said the recommendation from Unesco to the committee was “based on the best available science”.
‘“It contains recommendations that are urgently needed to give the reef a fighting a chance.
“We urge the committee to assess whether to implement this draft decision based on the integrity of the science, not based on the lobbying efforts of the Australian government.”