Brazilian president Lula da Silva said Julian Assange “cannot be punished” in his UN speech

Brazilian president’s call comes a day before Australian MPs and Senators begin a series of meetings in Washington to put pressure on the Biden administration.

A giant billboard in Melbournecalls for the release of Julian Assange. Picture: AFP.

Brazilian president Lula da Silva has called for the release of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a major speech at the United Nations, increasing global pressure on the US to drop its longstanding espionage charges against the Australian citizen.

On the day a group of Australian parliamentarians, including former deputy prime minster Barnaby Joyce, arrived in Washington to press the US government to drop its charges, Brazil’s second-time president, declared press freedom to be “essential”.

“A journalist like Julian Assange cannot be punished for informing society in a transparent and legitimate way,” the president said in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly, a few hours after President Joe Biden delivered an address.

The US has been seeking to extradite Mr Assange, 52, from the UK for years, for alleged crimes under the 1917 Espionage Act related to WikiLeaks’ publication in 2010 of vast troves of classified material related to the Iraq war, which humiliated Washington with embarrassing details about casualties and other internal deliberations.

Liberal Senator Alex Antic, part of the Australian delegation of MPs and Senators coming to Washington to put pressure on the Biden administration to release Assange, told The Australian the issue now “transcended party politics”.

“It is my hope that the Assange Campaign Parliamentary Delegation will impress upon US lawmakers the real sentiment in Australia for Julian to be released back to his family in Australia,” he said.

Mr Assange, who has been imprisoned at Belmarsh in the UK since he was dragged out of the Ecuadorean embassy in London in April 2019, has built considerable support among both Democrats and Republicans in the US.

Republican congressman Thomas Massie told The Australian last week that efforts to prosecute Assange “threatened the First Amendment rights of Americans”.

“During his term in office, I asked President Trump to pardon Mr Assange, and I was disappointed by his failure to do so,” he said.

Mr Trump’s eldest son, Don Junior, in April said Mr Assange and Edward Snowden, who has similarly evaded US prosecutors having absconded to Moscow, should be pardoned, in a possible clue to how a future Trump administration might act.

“President Biden should stop seeking Assange’s extradition and should instead drop the criminal charges currently being pursued by the Department of Justice,” Mr Massie added.

On a visit to Australia in July Secretary of State Antony Blinken appeared to dash the government’s hopes it might have been able to secure Mr Assange’s release after foreign minister Wong publicly said the charges had “dragged too long” and should be “brought to a conclusion”.

“I understand the concerns and views of Australians. I think it’s very important that our friends here understand our concerns about this matter,” Mr Blinken told reporters in Brisbane.

“Mr Assange was charged with very serious criminal conduct in the United States in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of our country,” he added.

In April seven top Democrats publicly demanded the US drop all the charges and withdraw its extradition request to the UK, arguing the four-year-old pursuit of the WikiLeaks founder was “undermining the moral standing of the US on the world stage”.

Foreign governments, including those of Brazil and Russia, have used Washington’s pursuit of Assange to accuse the US of hypocrisy when it espouses the importance of human rights and press freedom.

“The prosecution of Julian Assange for carrying out journalistic activities greatly diminishes America’s credibility as a defender [press freedom], effectively granting cover to authoritarian governments who can (and do) point to Assange’s prosecution to reject evidence-based criticisms of their human rights records and as a precedent that justifies the criminalisation of reporting on their activities,” the letter read.