Australia

3620 readers

157 users here now

A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.

Before you post:

If you're posting anything related to:

The Environment, post it to Aussie Environment
Politics, post it to Australian Politics
World News/Events, post it to World News
A question to Australians (from outside) post it to Ask an Australian

If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News

Rules

This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:

When posting news articles use the source headline and place your commentary in a separate comment

Banner Photo

Congratulations to @[email protected] who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition

Recommended and Related Communities

Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:

Plus other communities for sport and major cities.

https://aussie.zone/communities

Moderation

Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.

Additionally, we have our instance admins: @[email protected] and @[email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

"Dangerous precedent that threatens human rights": Julian Assange campaign advisor says Australia "must work aggressively to ensure his release" (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

2 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Greg Barns claims that the case should be stopped because it represents an unprecedented attempt by the US to prosecute an individual who is not one of its citizens, and who was not in the US when the WikiLeaks material was published. This is called extraterritorial reach and generally the law frowns on it.

"To reward the US in the Assange case is to say that any person, anywhere in the world, who publishes materials which the US government doesn’t want the world to know about could find themselves on the end of an extradition request from the Department of Justice," Barns adds.

"Australia, along with the US and the UK, last year criticised China for the extraterritorial application of its Hong Kong security law. It is, according to a state department spokesperson 'a dangerous precedent that threatens the human rights and fundamental freedoms of people all over the world'. Unless the US and Australia release Assange now they can’t claim any moral high ground on this issue."

top 2 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Greg Barns claims that the case should be stopped because it represents an unprecedented attempt by the US to prosecute an individual who is not one of its citizens, and who was not in the US when the WikiLeaks material was published. This is called extraterritorial reach and generally the law frowns on it.

The US and the UK have an extradition treaty that permits this. The UK can withdraw from the treaty, but unless they do this line of argument is willfully dishonest.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Yep, the argument pretty much fails right out of the gate.