SYDNEY, Australia — Australia’s prime minister said Monday he will engage “diplomatically”
over the US prosecution of
Julian Assange, but he is standing by earlier
remarks questioning the purpose of further legal action.
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As domestic
pressure mounted on him to intervene in the WikiLeaks founder’s case,
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he is sticking to comments he made while in
opposition last year that “enough is enough”.
“I do not see what
purpose is served by the ongoing pursuit of Mr Assange,” Albanese said at the
time.
But the Australian
leader took a swipe at “people who think that if you put things in capital
letters on Twitter and put an exclamation mark, then that somehow makes it more
important”.
Instead, he said:
“I intend to lead a government that engages diplomatically and appropriately
with our partners.”
Assange’s wife
Stella Assange told ABC radio Monday that she understood the Albanese
government was raising her husband’s case with
US President Joe Biden’s administration.
“That is extremely
welcome news,” she said, adding that she had not been able to see Assange since
a British court last week cleared the path for his extradition to the US.
“When I heard the
news I just wanted to give him a hug,” she said.
Assange’s
long-running legal saga began in 2010 after WikiLeaks published more than
500,000 classified US documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He has been held on
remand at a top-security jail in southeast London since 2019 for jumping bail
in a previous case accusing him of sexual assault in Sweden.
That case was
dropped but he was not released on grounds he was a flight risk in the US
extradition case.
As Assange’s
potential US extradition looms, several high profile Australians, including
former foreign minister Bob Carr, have called on Albanese to demand the US drop
the prosecution.
“If Albanese asks,
my guess is America will agree,” Carr wrote Monday in an op-ed in the Sydney
Morning Herald.
Carr argued
Assange’s prosecution stood in sharp contrast to the US pardoning former
military intelligence officer Chelsea Manning, who had leaked the secret files
to WikiLeaks.
“Our new prime
minister can say: ‘We’re not fans of the guy either, Mr President, but it’s
gone on long enough. We’re good allies. Let this one drop’.”
While campaigning for May elections that swept his
Labor Party to power, Albanese said that Assange had “paid a big price for the
publication of that information already”.
Carr was serving as
foreign minister in 2012 when Assange, who was facing sexual assault
allegations, sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
For much of the
past decade, Australia’s previous conservative government did not publicly
advocate for Assange’s release.
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