A cross-party group of Australian members of parliament met with the US ambassador to Australia on Tuesday and called for Washington to drop the charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, an Australian citizen.
The delegation of lawmakers, known as the Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Group, told US Ambassador Caroline Kennedy that there was broad support for Assange in the Australian Parliament.
Independent MP Andrew Wilkie said in a statement that the lawmakers “impressed upon the Ambassador the broad support in the Australian Parliament for Mr. Assange, which was echoed clearly by both the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader last week when they said this matter had gone on long enough.”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said last week that he was “frustrated” by the Biden administration’s continued efforts to extradite Assange. If he is convicted in the US, Assange faces up to 175 years in prison for publishing information related to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The conviction would set a dangerous precedent for press freedom in the United States and around the world, as Assange is not an American citizen. The Biden administration has come under more pressure to drop the charges against Assange, who has been held in London’s Belmarsh Prison since April 2019, when the Trump administration’s Justice Department unsealed the indictment against him.
More world leaders have been speaking out for Assange, including Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. “It is an embarrassment that a journalist who denounced trickery by one state against another is arrested, condemned to die in jail and we do nothing to free him. It’s a crazy thing,” Lula said last week.
“We talk about freedom of expression; the guy is in prison because he denounced wrongdoing. And the press doesn’t do anything in defense of this journalist. I can’t understand it,” the Brazilian leader added.
Ambassador Kennedy is the last surviving child of President John F. Kennedy, and her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., recently launched a presidential bid and has said he would pardon Assange if elected.
“Instead of championing free speech, the US actively persecutes journalists and whistleblowers. I’ll pardon brave truth-tellers like Julian Assange and investigate the corruption and crimes they exposed,” RFK Jr. wrote on Twitter.
It ‘s sad that this article received no comments.
And also sad that David Miranda died.
Edward Snowden
@Snowden
Heartbreaking news. Of everyone who had a hand in the 2013 revelations of global mass surveillance, my dear friend David Miranda was perhaps the most righteous—and pure.
I will never forget that when the UK broke its own laws to detain David as a “terrorist” for daring to aid an act of journalism—and threatened to throw him in a dungeon for the rest of his life—he never faltered. Instead, he dared them to do it.
It was that courage that set him free. That courage that moved the story forward. That will forever serve as the example of a man at his best.
I will miss you, David.
Stay free.
Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald
·
8h
It is with the most profound sadness that I announce the passing away of my husband, @DavidMirandaRio. He would have turned 38 tomorrow.
His death, early this morning, came after a 9-month battle in ICU. He died in full peace, surrounded by our children and family and friends.
Free Assange Now…!
“Instead of championing free speech, the US actively persecutes journalists and whistleblowers. I’ll pardon brave truth-tellers like Julian Assange and investigate the corruption and crimes they exposed,” RFK Jr. wrote on Twitter.
Please RFK, renounce your previous stance on vaccines. You don’t have to be serious. This guy is too good to be true.
This were Sophoclean, … were not Biden so absurdly and monumentally corrupt.
So Australia sat on the sidelines all these years? I will say this, it’s absolutely not encouraging at all to be a citizen of Australia.
Our government is hopeless and spineless.