PRESS RELEASE: How can Mark Dreyfus have confidence in the US justice system when Joe Biden doesn’t? Free Dan Duggan now!
The Australian Citizens Party (ACP) today called on the Albanese government, and specifically Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, to end the cruel and unjustified extradition process against Dan Duggan immediately, in light of President Joe Biden’s pardon for his son Hunter because he has no confidence in the US justice system.
Former US Navy “Top Gun” and naturalised Australian father-of-six Dan Duggan has suffered in NSW prisons for two years and almost two months, despite never having broken Australian laws.
He and his family are going through hell awaiting Mark Dreyfus’s decision on whether to extradite him to the United States in response to a 2017 secret grand jury indictment for training Chinese pilots in South Africa in 2012.
Of all the pilots who provided training in South Africa, which included Australians and Brits, only former US citizen Dan Duggan has been charged, showing the political nature of the exercise.
Also, the charges do not meet the extradition test of dual criminality, which requires the alleged offense to be a crime in both Australia and the USA.
Duggan has lost both his mother and brother while in prison, unable to support and grieve with his family.
His wife Saffrine and their six children are facing their third Christmas without their husband and father and are struggling under extreme psychological stress and financial duress.
After more than two years of legal costs, travel costs to see him in prison and to visit Parliament to advocate on his behalf, and with no income coming in from Dan, the family is in severe debt.
Despite the most powerful government in the world having all the advantages against this Aussie family, the USA has forced the Duggans to fight with one hand tied behind their backs by freezing the sale of Saffrine’s rural property in southern NSW the day before it was contracted to sell for $4.2 million—enough to fund a legal defence and support the family.
The family is forced to survive on debt and donations from generous Australians.
They have been waiting since August for Dreyfus to decide whether the extradition will proceed.
The fact that his decision is taking so long indicates that the arguments put to him in a submission prepared by Dan Duggan’s lawyer Bernard Collaery—who is working pro bono—have real merit.
Collaery submitted that secret grand jury indictments “are inimical to Australian concepts of criminal justice and to US-Australian treaty law … The Duggan extradition request does not emanate from within the United States police enforcement or judicial system as treaty arrangements anticipate. It has been prepared politically by officials from defence and intelligence services backed by a Grand Jury indictment issued outside a judicial process as we know it.”
Collaery asserts what the ACP charged from the beginning, that Dan Duggan is being scapegoated for a US political climate baying for conflict with China.
“The President of the United States has pardoned his convicted son to protect his family, but his Justice Department is cruelly pushing an extradition that is destroying an Australian family”, ACP Research Director Robert Barwick said today.
“Biden’s justification for pardoning Hunter was that he had been ‘selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted’.
“This is an admission from the current president that America’s justice system is weaponised to pursue politically motivated charges; incoming president Trump makes the same claim.”
“So how can Mark Dreyfus put the Aussie Duggan family at the mercy of this system that that two current presidents denounce?”
“The Attorney-General should end the torture of the Duggan family: block the extradition and send Dan Duggan home to his children by Christmas.”
The Australian Citizens Party is an independent, federally-registered political party, founded in 1988. It is committed to the economic and national sovereignty of Australia, and policies that promote the economic development of Australia for the benefit of all its people, not just the vested corporate interests which have too much influence over the major political parties. It takes its inspiration from the "old Labor" party stalwarts including King O'Malley, who fought to establish Australia's national bank, the Commonwealth Bank, and John Curtin and Ben Chifley, who used the Commonwealth Bank to lead the economic mobilisation that saved Australia in WWII. The ACP fought against the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank, which has concentrated financial power in Australia in the Big Four banking oligopoly that gouges short-term profits at the expence of Australians and the nation's economic development, and is campaigning to re-establish a national bank, modelled on the old Commonwealth Bank, as a government post office bank which would guarantee face-to-face banking services, and access to cash, for all communities, and break the Big Four banking oligopoly. The ACP stands for an independent foreign policy, so Australia can end its subservience to the United States and United Kingdom.
