IT IS a terrible punishment that Lucille McLaughlan is facing in Saudi Arabia - a public flogging of 500 lashes and eight years in jail.

So, too, is the possibility that her colleague Deborah Parry could be beheaded for her part in the murder of Australian nurse Yvonne Gilford.

Already Foreign Secretary Robin Cook has denounced the sentence on Miss McLaughlan as "wholly unacceptable in the modern world."

Yet, in that condemnation there is drawn the very contrast.

By our standards in the west, Saudi law and punishment are indeed horrendously extreme; barbaric even.

But by theirs, this is true justice underpinned by the holy authority of the Koran.

And let it not be forgotten that, in this case, it is evaluating a truly brutal murder. Yvonne Gilford was repeatedly stabbed, clubbed and suffocated. And to Saudi minds and its legal system, punishment must evidently be weighed against the horror of the deed.

But is that not also a contrast which many people in this still country draw and lament that the yardstick of punishment-to-fit-the-crime is now so often forgotten?

Certainly, its harsh application in Saudi Arabia means that its minimal crime rate is one that many western societies, with their supposedly higher values and civilised codes, look on with envy.

Nor must it be overlooked that westerners living and working in Saudi Arabia are fully aware of that country's standards and cannot, when they fall foul of them, import their own.

The old axiom of "When in Rome..." applies.

Therefore, while the west is free to condemn the severity of Saudi Arabian justice and, quite rightly, appeal and call for the compassion that the Islamic code of justice allows in determining whether sentences are carried out, it cannot truly moralise.

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