AUSTRALIAN PM REFUSES TO PUBLICLY INTERVENE FOR JULIAN ASSANGE

Mon 20 June 2022:

Stella Assange, Assange’s wife, is concerned about her husband’s deteriorating health

Anthony Albanese, Australia’s newly elected prime minister, has declined to publicly demand that the US drop its prosecution of WikiLeaks founder and Australian citizen Julian Assange.

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

Albanese refused to reveal whether he had spoken to President Joe Biden about the matter after the British government ordered his extradition to the US on spying charges last week, putting him in risk of serving up to 175 years in prison.

“There are some people who think that if you put things in capital letters on Twitter and put an exclamation mark, that somehow makes it more important. It doesn’t,” said Albanese, who came to power in elections a month ago.

“I intend to lead a government that engages diplomatically and appropriately with our partners,” Albanese added.

Assange’s supporters and lawyers argue that his acts were protected by the US Constitution, and his lawyers have promised to challenge the judgment of the United Kingdom.

The court battle began in 2010, when Wikileaks released over 500,000 secret US papers related to the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.

Worries

Meanwhile, Assange’s wife Stella Assange believes there has been a noticeable “shift” in the Australian government’s handling of her husband’s case since Albanese’s election win.

Speaking to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, she said Australia “can and should be speaking to its closest ally to bring this matter to a close”, calling the case an “aberration” that criminalises journalism.

Stella said 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,” she said.

Also, she expressed worries about what she described as his deteriorating health situation.

“It’s a nasty environment and it would deteriorate anyone’s health but he was already in a bad health situation when he entered the prison,” she said, adding that her husband had suffered a “ministroke” in October last year.

“So his health was in decline and we’re extremely worried that he will at any moment have a catastrophic health episode inside Belmarsh prison without the ability to get emergency treatment – because that’s the nature of prisons, basically.”

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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