Attorney-General: Australia Has No Plans to Go After Assange
There is no immediate possibility that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will face prosecution in Australia despite his site's recent leaks of U.S. diplomatic cables that compromised sensitive information about the country's intelligence activities.
This according to the office of Attorney-General Robert McClelland, which issued a statement on Monday pointing out that as in the case last year, wherein the Australian Federal Police launched a probe on the anti-secrecy website but eventually dropped the inquiry in late 2010, "we are not planning on launching any further investigations."
A spokesman for McClelland said in the statement that as of this time, Australian authorities have yet to determine if Assange, a native of Australia, had violated any laws of the country that could warrant a case against him.
The federal authorities, however, called Assange's action as grossly irresponsible and the harshest action directed against him so far was the government's decision to revoke his passport.
McClelland issued his remarks amidst the new batch of unredacted documents that WikiLeaks had released last week, with many of the diplomatic cables carrying information that revealed Australia's intelligence dealings, including the identity of one its intelligence officers.
"WikiLeaks redacted identifying features where the safety of individuals or national security could be put at risk," McClelland confirmed last week, adding that "many of these documents contain identifying information."
"I am aware of at least one cable in which an (Australian spy agency) ASIO officer is purported to have been identified," the Attorney-General admitted as reported by the Agence France-Presse (AFP).
As early as November last year, Assange's website has been issuing mostly edited versions of diplomatic cables that largely covered the assessments of U.S. ambassadors posted on different countries around the world.
Last week however, WikiLeaks unleashed more than 250,000 unredacted documents from U.S. embassies across the globe, with the controversial site justifying its action by tweeting: "Shining a light on 45 years of U.S. 'diplomacy' ... it is time to open the archives forever."