The presence at Julian Assange’s final court hearing in Saipan of Australia’s two most senior diplomatic heads of mission – Stephen Smith, High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, and Kevin Rudd, Ambassador to the United States – provided a glimpse of just how much human effort and financial resources the Australian government has dedicated to the Wikileaks founder’s case in recent times. We also know that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has spent some considerable time on this case, including in direct advocacy with the President of the United States.
Earlier tonight I was pleased to speak with Julian Assange to welcome him home to his family in Australia. pic.twitter.com/r0Yl3iJtdb
— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) June 26, 2024
This is not standard consular service. As I explain in my book The Consul, there are at least 300 Australians imprisoned overseas at any given moment, and many more are arrested on a short-term basis through the year. Consistent with the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, which governs how these situations should be handled, there are limits to what the Australian consular service can and should do – beyond checking on people’s welfare periodically and guiding them towards local legal representation.
Australians generally wouldn’t expect their government to do any more than this. There can be little doubt, after all, that most of these people have a case to answer. And most people understand that Australian citizenship doesn’t come with a “get out of jail free card”.
And yet sometimes our government will step beyond convention and advocate for an individual’s release. What usually makes the difference is that the case comes to offend our national sense of justice, and public sentiment encourages the government into more concerted action. Our officials and ministers have their own sense of what is right and wrong, of course, and their views are often in sync with those held in the community. Ultimately, it’s a matter of political judgment – there are no legal or even policy obligations that determine any particular approach.
The effort involved, and the extent to which officials themselves become invested personally in these cases, should not be underestimated.
There have been several recent cases that have led Australians to a unified view that the individuals concerned were victims of injustice. And the previous coalition government could be as responsive to this kind of public sentiment as the current one. Peter Greste’s prolonged imprisonment by the Egyptian authorities during the Arab Spring was clearly repressive, and then-foreign minister Julie Bishop played a leading role in the international campaign to secure his freedom. Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s 804-day ordeal in Iran was purely transactional in its motivation. Her release in late 2020 involved a complex three-nation prisoner exchange deal negotiated by Australia’s most senior intelligence official and the use of an RAAF aircraft to bring her home.
During the Albanese government’s term, at least two other high-profile Australians have been released after campaigns led at the most senior political level. Sean Turnell, who the Myanmar military regime imprisoned for 650 days for doing nothing more than providing economic advice to the country’s previous democratic leader, and Cheng Lei, the Australian journalist who served more than three years in China on charges of spying without ever facing a public trial. When the time came, the respective Australian ambassadors accompanied them both on their journeys home, and their freedom was publicly celebrated by Foreign Minister Penny Wong, who had worked hard to secure these outcomes along with the prime minister himself.
As a former head of the consular service, I know that what we see through the media is only the tip of the iceberg. It is impossible to estimate the number of hours spent by DFAT officials and government ministers in lobbying other governments, supporting families, visiting prisoners, and managing public and political interest in these cases. There is no doubt scope to improve the quality of this work further – the Australian senate is taking an interest, this week announcing an inquiry into the “wrongful detention of Australians overseas”. But the effort involved, and the extent to which officials themselves become invested personally in these cases, should not be underestimated.
It’s hard to think of a case that has consumed more official hours and dollars than that of Julian Assange. One of the interesting things about Assange, though, was that a unified public consensus about the merits of his case was much slower to emerge than in the other recent high-profile situations involving Australians imprisoned abroad. For many, in Australia and beyond, Assange was a whistleblower and journalist dedicated to exposing ugly truths about the world’s greatest military power, and no less a principle than freedom of information was at stake. But for others, he was a traitor who had participated in the theft of secret information and exposed innocent agents’ lives in the process. Even now, not everyone would agree that what he did can be described as journalism.
For quite some time, successive Australian foreign ministers from both sides of politics showed little real interest in providing Assange with anything more than standard consular support. But as the saga wore on, Australian public opinion consolidated around a view that he’d been punished enough, and that his continued detention on behalf of our closest military ally was unwarranted. And soon after it was elected, the current government made it clear that it shared this view.
At that point, all that remained was the sheer effort required to secure what most Australians believe was, on balance, the right outcome.
