Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Monday rejected calls for him to publicly demand the United States drop its prosecution of WikiLeaks founder and Australian citizen Julian Assange. The Australian government has been under mounting pressure to intervene since the British government last week ordered Assange’s extradition to the United States on spying charges. Assange’s supporters and lawyers say his actions were protected by the U.S. Constitution. Albanese, who came to power at elections a month ago, declined to say whether he had spoken to President Joe Biden about the case. “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,” Albanese told reporters. “I intend to lead a government that engages diplomatically and appropriately with our partners,” Albanese added. Read: Russian journalist sells Nobel Prize for Ukrainian children Attorney General Mark Dreyfus and Foreign Minister Penny Wong responded to the British government’s decision by saying Assange’s “case has dragged on for too long and ... should be brought to a close.” They said they would continue to express that view to the U.K. and U.S. governments, but their joint statement fell short of calling for the United States to drop the case. Assange supporters calling for Australian government intervention include his wife Stella Assange. “The Australian government can and should be speaking to its closest ally to bring this matter to a close,” she told Australian Broadcasting Corp. Bob Carr, who was foreign minister when Albanese’s center-left Labor Party was last in power in 2012 and 2013, wrote in an opinion piece in The Sydney Morning Herald on Monday that an Australian request to drop Assange’s prosecution was “small change” in Australia’s defense alliance with the United States. Read: Judge sends Assange extradition decision to UK government American prosecutors say Assange helped U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal classified diplomatic cables and military files that WikiLeaks later published, putting lives at risk. Carr noted that Manning’s sentence was commuted in 2017. “It looks like one rule for Americans, another for citizens of its ally,” Carr wrote. Carr told AuBC that Assange going on trial in the United States would “ignite anti-Americanism in Australia in a way we haven’t seen.” He said hostility to the Australian-American alliance wasn’t “in the interests of either country.” Assange’s lawyers plan to appeal, extending the process by months or even years. His wife Stella Assange 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,” Stella Assange said.

The U.S. government is scheduled to ask Britain’s High Court on Wednesday to overturn a judge’s decision that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should not be sent to the United States to face espionage charges. In January, a lower court judge refused an American request to extradite Assange on spying charges over WikiLeaks’ publication of secret military documents a decade ago. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser denied extradition on health grounds, saying Assange was likely to kill himself if held under harsh U.S. prison conditions. But she rejected defense arguments that Assange faces a politically motivated American prosecution that would override free-speech protections, and she said the U.S. judicial system would give him a fair trial. READ: UK judge to rule on US extradition for WikiLeaks' Assange Lawyers for U.S. authorities have been granted permission to appeal. At an earlier hearing they questioned the psychiatric evidence in the case and argued that Assange does not meet the threshold of being “so ill” that he cannot resist harming himself. Assange, who is being held at London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison, is expected to attend the two-day hearing by video link. The two justices hearing the appeal — who include England’s most senior judge, Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett — are not expected to give their ruling for several weeks. Even that will likely not end the epic legal saga, since the losing side can seek to appeal to the U.K. Supreme Court. U.S. prosecutors have indicted Assange on 17 espionage charges and one charge of computer misuse over WikiLeaks’ publication of thousands of leaked military and diplomatic documents. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison. The prosecutors say Assange unlawfully helped U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal classified diplomatic cables and military files that WikiLeaks later published. Lawyers for Assange argue that he was acting as a journalist and is entitled to First Amendment freedom of speech protections for publishing documents that exposed U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange, 50, has been in prison since he was arrested in April 2019 for skipping bail during a separate legal battle. Before that he spent seven years holed up inside Ecuador’s London embassy, where he fled in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault. READ: UK judge rejects bid to delay Assange extradition hearing Sweden dropped the sex crimes investigations in November 2019 because so much time had elapsed, but Assange remains in prison. The judge who blocked extradition in January ordered that he must stay in custody during any U.S. appeal, ruling that the Australian citizen “has an incentive to abscond” if he is freed. WikiLeaks supporters say testimony from witnesses during the extradition hearing that Assange was spied on while in the embassy by a Spanish security firm at the behest of the CIA — and that there was even talk of abducting or killing him — undermines U.S. claims he will be treated fairly. Journalism organizations and human rights groups have urged President Joe Biden to drop the prosecution launched under his predecessor, Donald Trump. Amnesty International Secretary-General Agnes Callamard said the charges were politically motivated and should be dropped. “It is a damning indictment that nearly 20 years on, virtually no one responsible for alleged U.S. war crimes committed in the course of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars has been held accountable, let alone prosecuted, and yet a publisher who exposed such crimes is potentially facing a lifetime in jail,” she said.