Julian Assange has been detained in the Ecuadorean embassy for the best part of six years now. He is more isolated than ever with the Ecuadorean government cutting his access to the Internet in April. And the Americans are baying for his blood, some might say literally. Attorney-General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have made no secret of their desire to shut down WikiLeaks which the latter calls a “hostile non-state intelligence service”, and to see Assange arrested. This week, the senior Democrat congressman on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, rebuffed overtures to meet Assange with the statement that he would only do so when Assange was in US custody.

The message from the United States confirms the fear that drove Assange to seek asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy in 2012, when Swedish prosecutors were seeking to question him about some allegations – that is, the US will seek to extradite him to face charges concerning WikiLeaks activities. Furthermore, the tenor of the recent comments by Pompeo, Sessions and Schiff are decidedly aggressive and hostile from which a reasonable person would infer that Assange will be subjected to torture and cruel and unusual punishment of the sort meted out to Chelsea Manning, when she was detained in July 2010, and subsequently tried and convicted for allegedly providing material to WikiLeaks.

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There is an opportunity for Australia to help resolve matters, particularly given that the reason for the reticence on Canberra’s part to involve itself in the Assange case has now gone.

While Assange has been granted Ecuadorean citizenship he remains an Australian citizen and has familial ties to this country. Assange has strong family ties to Australia: both his parents live here and are aging, and this is the country he grew up in and lived in for the first two and a bit decades of his life. Up until 2010 this was home.