Australian PM Albanese refuses to publicly intervene on Assange

Assange supporters calling for Australian government intervention include his wife Stella Assange.

“The Australian government can and should be speaking to its closest ally to bring this matter to a close,” she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Bob Carr, who was foreign minister when Albanese’s centre-left Labor Party was last in power in 2012 and 2013, wrote in an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday that an Australian request to drop Assange’s prosecution was “small change” in Australia’s defence alliance with the United States.

American prosecutors say that Assange helped US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal classified diplomatic cables and military files that WikiLeaks later published, putting lives at risk.

Carr noted that Manning’s sentence was commuted in 2017.

“It looks like one rule for Americans, another for citizens of its ally,” Carr wrote.

Carr told ABC that Assange going on trial in the US would “ignite anti-Americanism in Australia in a way we haven’t seen”.

He said that hostility to the Australian-American alliance wasn’t “in the interests of either country”.

Assange’s lawyers plan to appeal, extending the process by months or even years.

His wife Stella Assange said that her husband was being prosecuted for exposing war crimes and abuses of power.

“The only goal here is to free Julian because this has been going on since 2010. He’s been in prison for over three years and the case against him is a travesty,” Stella Assange said.

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