CANBERRA/SYDNEY/LONDON/WASHINGTON: After Julian Assange was released by a court on the remote US Pacific territory of Saipan on Wednesday (June 26,) ending a 14-year legal battle, the WikiLeaks founder’s lawyer first thanked Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for making the outcome possible.
Jennifer Robinson, the Australian attorney of Assange, said diplomacy and intense lobbying with the highest authorities in the US played a big role in Assange walking free, after spending five years in a high-security British prison and seven years holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.
“At every opportunity, and when Australian officials were making outreach to the US they knew that they were acting with the full authority of the prime minister of Australia,” Robinson told reporters outside the courtroom in Saipan.
However, on Wednesday, White House national security spokesman John Kirby said it was not in any way involved in the case of Assange, who was freed earlier this week
“That was a Department of Justice matter and they’re the only ones that can speak to it,” he told a briefing call for reporters. That after Assange arrived in Australia, after pleading guilty to violating US espionage law.
“STANDING UP FOR AUSTRALIANS AROUND THE WORLD”
Australia’s Prime Minister Albanese has claimed Assange’s release as a win for the country, which leveraged its security ties with Washington and London to strengthen its case to resolve the plight of an Australian citizen.
“This work has been complex and it has been considered. This is what standing up for Australians around the world looks like,” Albanese, leader of a centre-left Labor government, told parliament on Wednesday.
Assange, who landed back in Australia on Wednesday evening, had faced a maximum jail sentence of 175 years after being charged with 17 counts of breaching the US Espionage Act and a hacking-related charge. Under a deal revealed on Tuesday, he pled guilty to a single charge of espionage and walked free.
The deal gained momentum as the US faced growing challenges in the UK over the legality of extraditing Assange, while Australian lawmakers and diplomats raised the heat in Washington and London.
CHANGE IN POLITICAL WILL IN 2023
A decade ago under a conservative government, there was little political will in Canberra to back Assange’s case. But things changed in 2023 when dozens of lawmakers across the political spectrum swung in behind the campaign to bring him home, his father, John Shipton, told Reuters.
That swing culminated in the passage of a parliamentary motion in February this year calling for Assange’s release.
Shipton told Reuters the Australian government had been “nothing short of magnificent” and praised former prime minister Kevin Rudd and former defence minister Stephen Smith, Australia’s top envoys to the US and Britain.
Australian conservative lawmaker Barnaby Joyce, a former deputy prime minister, was among a cross-party group of politicians who travelled to Washington in September to lobby for a resolution.
Joyce said on Wednesday the trip made the case on Capitol Hill that Australian politicians wanted to “get this thing done” because it was a distraction to Australia’s security alliance with the United States.
Long-time advisor to the Australian campaign for Assange, lawyer Greg Barns, said US politicians saw on that trip that “this wasn’t a party political issue”.
One government official who did not want to be identified said the first big break for Assange came in January 2021, when then shadow Attorney General Mark Dreyfus issued a statement calling for the case against Assange to end after a British court found that it would be unjust to extradite him to the US.
“This was the first indication that a major political party in Australia was supporting the cause to free Assange,” the official said.
