CANBERRA/SYDNEY/LONDON/WASHINGTON: After Julian Assange was released by a judge on the remote US Pacific province of Saipan on Wednesday ( June 26, ) ending a 14- time legal battle, the WikiLeaks owner’s attorney first thanked Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for making the results possible.
After serving five times in a high-security American prison and spending seven years imprisoned in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, Assange’s American attorney, Jennifer Robinson, claimed diplomacy and severe campaigning with the US’s highest authorities were key factors in Assange’s release.
” At every chance, and when American authorities were making awareness to the US they knew that they were acting with the whole power of the Australian prime chancellor,” Robinson told reporters outside the court 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
He stated in a briefing call for reporters that” that was a Department of Justice matter,” adding that they are the only ones who could contact the agency. That after Assange arrived in Australia,  , after pleading guilty to violating US espionage law.
“STANDING UP FOR AUSTRALIANS ALL OVER THE WORLD”
Australia’s Prime Minister Albanese praised Assange’s release as a win for the nation, which benefited from its security ties with Washington and London to help it advance its case against the demise 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 returned to Australia on Wednesday evening, was accused of breaking the US Espionage Act and a charge involving hacking, and he was facing a maximum jail sentence of 175 years in prison. He pleaded guilty to a single charge of espionage and walked free in accordance with a deal that was made public on Tuesday.
As the US faced more pressing issues in the UK over the legality of extraditing Assange, and Australian lawmakers and diplomats heightened 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 change led to the passage of a parliamentary motion calling for Assange’s release in February of this year.
Shipton, one of Australia’s top envoys to the US and Britain, claimed the Australian government had been “nothing short of magnificent” and praised former prime minister Kevin Rudd and former defence minister Stephen Smith as Australia’s “nothing short of magnificent”
Former deputy prime minister of Australia, Barnaby Joyce, was one of the politicians who traveled to Washington in September to lobby for a resolution.
Joyce claimed on Wednesday that the trip made the case to Capitol Hill that Australian politicians wanted to “get this thing done” because it stifled Australia’s security partnership with the US.
Attorney Greg Barns, a long-time advisor to the Australian campaign for Assange, claimed US politicians saw on the trip that” this was n’t a party political issue.”
The first significant breakthrough for Assange occurred in January 2021, according to a government official who did not want to be identified. A British court had determined that it would be unfair to expel him to the US, so Mark Dreyfus issued a statement in January that called for the case to end.
The official said that this was the first indication that a major political party in Australia was backing the effort to free Assange.