Speaker 1: This is part two of a two part episode. If
Speaker 1: you haven't already, go back and take a listen to
Speaker 1: our first episode.
Speaker 2: Free Dan Duggle, Free Dan Duggy.
Speaker 1: For years, Dan Duggan's case has turned on one question
Speaker 1: after another, what happened in South Africa, what he knew,
Speaker 1: and whether, as an Australian citizen, the United States has
Speaker 1: the right to prosecute him at all. But by the
Speaker 1: time his case reached the Federal court this year, the
Speaker 1: fight was about something more immediate, whether Australia would let
Speaker 1: him go.
Speaker 3: Our government should make it clear that being an Australian
Speaker 3: citizen matters, and then when another country comes for you,
Speaker 3: they'll protect you as best they can, and they'll protect
Speaker 3: your family, they'll protect.
Speaker 4: Your asc it.
Speaker 1: I'm Nicole Johnston and you're listening to seven AM Today
Speaker 1: journalist Michael Sainsbury and saffaring Duggan on why they believe
Speaker 1: the Australian government really Approvedan's extradition and how his supporters
Speaker 1: came to see the case as part of a wider
Speaker 1: struggle between the United States and China. It's Monday, April
Speaker 1: twenty seven. Michael, Could you take us inside this recent
Speaker 1: extradition hearing what happened in court, So the.
Speaker 5: Recent extradition hearing was challenge to the extradition that Mark
Speaker 5: dreyfus had signed off for a year earlier. As you know,
Speaker 5: things take a while.
Speaker 6: It's court an Australian man who served as a US
Speaker 6: fighter pilot. He's set to face court in the US
Speaker 6: after his extradition was approved by Federal Attorney General Mark Dreyfusi.
Speaker 5: Chans Lori has argued that the offenses that he was
Speaker 5: charged with were not offenses in Australia at the time
Speaker 5: that the allegations were made.
Speaker 7: The main tank of his case that's just been decided
Speaker 7: on really focuses around the idea that in order to
Speaker 7: be extradited, the offense for which of which you're accused
Speaker 7: needs to be an offense in Australia and in the
Speaker 7: United States Dan is accused of.
Speaker 5: Australia did not have explicit comparable laws about training foreign
Speaker 5: militaries until twenty eighteen, and then we updated that again
Speaker 5: in twenty twenty one to make it even more explicit.
Speaker 5: But that's six years after the case.
Speaker 7: Dan was arrested in twenty twenty two, and at which
Speaker 7: time it was then possible to say that the historic
Speaker 7: activities were now an offense in Australia. So Dan really
Speaker 7: would have had to be a clairvoyant at the time
Speaker 7: that he was giving this training to know that in
Speaker 7: the future it was going to render him subject to extradition.
Speaker 7: So what that is is it really has the effect
Speaker 7: of making the Extradition Act a retroactive act, and that
Speaker 7: means that Australian citizens can do something that's legal today,
Speaker 7: it may become illegal in a few years time and
Speaker 7: they run the risk of being and extradited to a
Speaker 7: foreign country and tried under the foreign country's laws.
Speaker 1: Regardless of all of that, though the Federal Court rejected
Speaker 1: the argument why did they do that?
Speaker 8: Are?
Speaker 5: They rejected on a very literal approach and I think
Speaker 5: you often find with the single judge on the Federal
Speaker 5: Court that they will do that. And the difficulty with
Speaker 5: international law is quite often treaties overlay treaties which overlay
Speaker 5: underlying local legislation self a little bit kind of complicated,
Speaker 5: and you end up going to kind of the black litter.
Speaker 9: Of the law.
Speaker 10: The hearing was all over in a matter of minutes.
Speaker 10: The judge essentially threw out the family's application, which was
Speaker 10: based on legal arguments relating to the extradition. The judge
Speaker 10: also ordered that the dug and family paid legal costs,
Speaker 10: and that is a huge blow in itself.
Speaker 1: So if Dan Duggan is said to the US, what
Speaker 1: would he face? What could happen there?
Speaker 5: If he goes to the US. The way the charges
Speaker 5: have been stacked up, there's a maximum of sixty five
Speaker 5: years each of these counts. I think there's three of
Speaker 5: them carry a sentence up to twenty years each. Other
Speaker 5: people have said, you know, why doesn't he just go
Speaker 5: in and fight the charges there?
Speaker 11: Would he?
Speaker 5: He's an Australian citizen. He should prosecute every option under
Speaker 5: the Australian legal systems available to him before he goes
Speaker 5: and puts himself in the hands of a foreign legal system.
Speaker 5: That why we're sending somebody off to face a legal
Speaker 5: system in the US. It's falling apart.
Speaker 1: Do you think there's any similarities with this case and
Speaker 1: Julian Assange.
Speaker 5: There are obviously similarities because they're Australian citizens who the
Speaker 5: US is trying to get their hands on. It's interesting
Speaker 5: with Julian sign the US sent a whole team of
Speaker 5: lawyers over to England and to wherever he ended up
Speaker 5: getting led off, some small island in the Pacific. But
Speaker 5: for Dan's case, the US have got the Australian taxpayer
Speaker 5: through the Attorney General's Department to prosecute the US's case.
Speaker 5: So Australian taxpayers have been paying to try and get
Speaker 5: Dan extra to the US for something that if you
Speaker 5: did do it, it was an Australian citizen at the time
Speaker 5: and the US should really have any jurisdiction over him.
Speaker 1: The court case is one part of this, but in
Speaker 1: the end it is the Australian government who decides whether
Speaker 1: dug It will be extradited. So why have they chosen
Speaker 1: to do it? And what are they saying about it publicly?
Speaker 5: They're not saying anything publics that have been very, very
Speaker 5: very it's all been very process driven. It's been driven
Speaker 5: very much by the Attorney General's Department.
Speaker 8: Could I ask what, what, if any role your department
Speaker 8: has had in the extradition proceedings and incarceration of Daniel Togm.
Speaker 9: So the department's responsible for the Extradition Act and handling
Speaker 9: of the United States extradition requests.
Speaker 11: When your department receives an extradition request, do you do
Speaker 11: a due diligence to determine whether or not the offense
Speaker 11: which founds the extradition requests has a comparable offense under
Speaker 11: Australian law? Is that part of a due diligence process
Speaker 11: when you receive an extradition request.
Speaker 9: I'll get Musimberg to speak about this matter. But there
Speaker 9: was a provisional arrest request in the first instance, and
Speaker 9: we do consider dual criminality. Ultimately that is a matter
Speaker 9: that is considered by a magistrate, and it is before
Speaker 9: a magistrate.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we're very close to the US. I think that
Speaker 5: there's a feeling that we don't want to upset them
Speaker 5: and this is just, in their eyes, just a little
Speaker 5: case that it's not worth poking their neck up for.
Speaker 12: And we have raised the case of mistress change at
Speaker 12: all levels of government, and we've used all of our
Speaker 12: diplomatic efforts at every level.
Speaker 5: In the end, Albanez, you did apply diplomatic pressure in
Speaker 5: the Assantaige case, but you know that was a very big,
Speaker 5: loud public case. This isn't so much and doesn't seem
Speaker 5: like they feel like wasting any political capital to look
Speaker 5: after an Australian citizen, which is I think is a
Speaker 5: bit of a distress. At any point, the Attorney General
Speaker 5: can get rid of this, They can just say no.
Speaker 5: The side of the we're not going to extradide.
Speaker 1: Coming up is a geopolitical contest between the US and China.
Speaker 1: What's really driving this case. Michael Duggan and his supporters
Speaker 1: say that this is much bigger than one man that's
Speaker 1: caught in a geopolitical battle over China.
Speaker 2: He's being used as a pawn in an ideologic war
Speaker 2: between the United States and China, and the Australian government
Speaker 2: agencies have allowed this to happen as willing participants.
Speaker 1: Would you agree with that or how seriously should we
Speaker 1: take a claim like that?
Speaker 5: Look, I think that's true. Is certainly in the initial
Speaker 5: writing of the indictment. That was certainly a time when
Speaker 5: the US, particularly but other people in the West were
Speaker 5: starting to get worried about much more worried about China politically.
Speaker 13: Turned now to the case of two Chinese American scientists
Speaker 13: accused of espionage. Last year, the United States federal agents
Speaker 13: arrested Shi Shao Seng, the chairman of Temple University's physics Department.
Speaker 5: They knew that there was a lot of former military
Speaker 5: people out there doing things that they didn't necessarily want
Speaker 5: them to do. So there was a concerted effort by
Speaker 5: the US and eventually the UK and in Australia to
Speaker 5: try and wind all this back and pull it. In
Speaker 5: Dan's case, it had already started. The process as started,
Speaker 5: and there's no reason for the US to halt the process.
Speaker 5: But there's a big reason for US to halt the
Speaker 5: process because if this can happen to Dan, it can
Speaker 5: happen to a lot of other Australians. If we put
Speaker 5: Australians in jeopardy and are prepared to hand them across
Speaker 5: to a foreign legal system for things that they did
Speaker 5: a long time ago that weren't crimes here, you know,
Speaker 5: it opens a floodgate for foreign governments to be able
Speaker 5: to reach into our legal system and interfere with it.
Speaker 1: So, Michael, what is the next stage of this case,
Speaker 1: what happens next? And what is really at stake here?
Speaker 1: What's the big picture?
Speaker 5: A man's life is at stake. That's surely that should
Speaker 5: be enough. But in terms of what happens next, the
Speaker 5: extradition has now been improved again by the court, but
Speaker 5: there's an automatic right to an appeal to the full
Speaker 5: bench of the Federal Court within twenty eight days. So
Speaker 5: Dan's lawyers are obviously giving every consideration to that. Beyond
Speaker 5: that is the possibility of an appeal to the High Court.
Speaker 5: Those are the things that are being thought about at
Speaker 5: the moment. It does stand appeal or do they decide
Speaker 5: to take their chances in the US.
Speaker 1: Suffering? How long will you and Dan keep fighting it?
Speaker 2: We will continue to pursue every avenue available. This is
Speaker 2: a family that we are. I'm going to keep together
Speaker 2: and we will keep going on. It will not break us,
Speaker 2: and we will continue down every avenue we possibly can.
Speaker 2: But it's devastating having to tell the children that your
Speaker 2: father's not coming home. At the moment, majority of adults
Speaker 2: can't understand what's going on, so how can you explain
Speaker 2: it to a child. We are a type family. We
Speaker 2: do not give up. We never give up. We follow
Speaker 2: the next step and we just continue to stay together
Speaker 2: and pursue every avenue that we possibly can.
Speaker 1: What is the message that you have to the Australian government.
Speaker 1: What would you say to them about Dan and about
Speaker 1: how they're handling the case.
Speaker 2: I'm so disappointed in our government. I feel like I'd
Speaker 2: get no answers. It's been going on long enough. It
Speaker 2: is at the bequest of another country, and.
Speaker 1: I feel like.
Speaker 2: No one's trying to help us. They just want it
Speaker 2: all to go away. No one's trying to help. I
Speaker 2: hardly get any responses back. It takes months and months
Speaker 2: to get a response back from our government or Attorney
Speaker 2: General if any. I think the message that I get
Speaker 2: from them is that they can't do anything, and that
Speaker 2: is incorrect. The Attorney General and the Prime Minister can
Speaker 2: overturn this at any moment, so to give the message
Speaker 2: that it's in court continually is not good enough. You're
Speaker 2: at a very high ranking, you run our country, and
Speaker 2: it's not good enough for me, an Australian citizen to
Speaker 2: not be able to address something as big as this,
Speaker 2: and especially in our world today, you know. And the
Speaker 2: hardest things here are you know, is that I feel
Speaker 2: like I've lost all ability to dream, to look forward
Speaker 2: to book the next holiday.
Speaker 11: That's hard.
Speaker 2: It's hard not knowing where you're going to be in
Speaker 2: the next day, where you're going to be in the
Speaker 2: next week, where you're going to be in the next month.
Speaker 2: Living Groundhog Day is hard.
Speaker 1: It's the uncertainty, yeah, and that's what breaks everyone, the
Speaker 1: uncertainty suffering. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 4: Also in the news, world leaders including Anthony Albanesi have
Speaker 4: condemned an act of political violence after the White House
Speaker 4: correspondence dinner was interrupted by gunfire. The president evacuated as
Speaker 4: guests hit under tables. Police say the suspected gunman charged
Speaker 4: through a Secret Service checkpoint armed with multiple guns and knives.
Speaker 4: One officer was shot but was saved by his bulletproofest.
Speaker 4: Donald Trump says the Secret Service did a better job
Speaker 4: protecting him than the fascination attempt in twenty twenty four
Speaker 4: and Angus Taylor has called out coordinated booing at Anzac
Speaker 4: Day ceremonies in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, while at the
Speaker 4: same time sympathizing with those behind the booze. The opposition
Speaker 4: leader says he feels welcome to countries have been overused
Speaker 4: and he would like to see them use less. There
Speaker 4: are calls from indigenous leaders for those responsible to be named,
Speaker 4: photographed and banned from future Anzac Day services. Thanks for
Speaker 4: listening to seven am, we'll be back tomorrow.