Assange campaign escalates pressure after Wong pressed on jailed reporter in Russia

The campaign to free Julian Assange has urged Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to boost its efforts to negotiate the WikiLeaks founder’s release when the government meets US and UK leaders next month to discuss the AUKUS deal. 

The calls come in response to remarks made by Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong at the National Press Club on Monday, after she was asked whether international concern over the detainment of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in Russia on espionage charges would prompt the Australian government to do more to secure Assange’s release from the UK. 

Greg Barns SC, an adviser to the Assange campaign, said the Australian government can’t condemn Russia for detaining Gershkovich while refusing to take the “strongest diplomatic actions” to pressure US and UK leaders to release Assange.

“Our concern is that this is a case that’s more than simply about an Australian that’s incarcerated in a UK prison, in very difficult conditions. This is a case that strikes at the heart of democracy and freedom of speech,” Barns told Crikey. 

Barns said the government’s AUKUS agreement has offered two opportunities to negotiate Assange’s release. First, when Albanese met UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in March, and then during talks between Albanese, Sunak and US President Joe Biden in May, when the three are expected to discuss AUKUS.

The government faces renewed pressure to advance its efforts to free Assange as US authorities dig in their heels to secure the release of Gershkovich, the first American journalist to be detained in Russia on spying charges since the Cold War. 

Gershkovich was taken by Russian authorities in the city of Yekaterinburg, which sits roughly 1800 kilometres east of Moscow, on March 29, and has since been held in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison where he awaits trial, set to begin on May 29, and which could deliver a 20-year sentence.

He was visited by US consular officials for the first time since his arrest on Monday, and has drawn support from politicians across the US, including Biden, who called the reporter’s imprisonment “out of bounds” and “totally illegal”. 

Assange, by contrast, has been detained in Britain’s Belmarsh Prison since April 2019, where his health is reported to have deteriorated. He was visited for the first time by an Australian high commissioner earlier this month. 

The WikiLeaks co-founder is fighting US attempts to extradite him to face charges related to the publication in 2010 and onwards of hundreds of thousands of leaked defence documents detailing military conduct in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. 

Newly appointed high commissioner Stephen Smith’s visit to Belmarsh was dubbed a “significant” development by the Assange campaign, which Barns said indicated the Albanese government was taking the situation seriously. 

Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton told Crikey it was the right move by Wong to engage the high commissioner: “The minister is right to engage the commissioner on this issue. Julian should be at home with his family, not rotting in a British dungeon.

“Four years in a maximum security prison for publishing truthful information isn’t a legal proceeding. It’s a political persecution.”

On Monday, Wong was reserved when pressed about what progress the government had made, other than that she has charged Smith with engaging British authorities on the conditions faced by Assange at Belmarsh, a “category A” detention facility in London’s south-east. 

“We think Mr Assange’s case has dragged on for too long. We think that it should be brought to a close. That’s our public position, and that reflects what we have communicated at leader level and at my level and at other levels throughout our engagement,” Wong said on Monday. 

“[But] there are obviously limits to what you can do in terms of another country’s legal proceedings, and we’re not a party to those proceedings. We can’t intervene in those proceedings, just as the UK and the US can’t intervene in our legal proceedings.”