Dan Duggan Appeals Decision to Extradite to an Authoritarian United States

The date has been set for the appeal against the extradition of Australian citizen Daniel Duggan to the United States over highly dubious accusations regarding flight training in South Africa. Dan is set challenge his extradition to the Federal Court of Australia on 26 August 2025. Yet, after having been dragged across hot coals in a variety of ways, the Duggans are now struggling to fit the bills.

At 21 June 2025, the former US marine pilot and father-of-six with no criminal record has been remanded in the NSW prison system for over 32 months without any criminal charges being brought against him. Duggan hasn’t been able to spend the last 2 years and 8 months on conditional release at home with his wife, Saffrine, and their six Australian kids because under local extradition law there is presumption against bail.

This case is controversial because it’s so full of holes that beggars belief: Duggan, a US marine pilot over the 13 years to 2002, whose been an Australian citizen since 2012, is slated for extradition based on a 2017 District Court of Columbia grand jury indictment that frames his training of Chinese nationals at a South African flying school 13 years ago, as having violated a US arms embargo.

The Duggans still hold hope that new attorney general Michelle Rowland will use the power she has to intervene in Dan’s case, as his alleged crime didn’t even exist on the Australian books until after the indictment was sealed, which was required to satisfy ‘dual criminality’ in order for extradition to proceed, which was a point that didn’t trigger the concern of her predecessor Mark Dreyfus.

Another key reason why Rowland might exercise her power to end Duggan’s extradition at this point is since Dreyfus greenlighted it last Christmas, the Trump administration has established authoritarian rule in the US, and this development is likely to provide yet another ground of appeal in Duggan’s court case in August.

Criminalisation after the fact

Duggan was taken into custody by the Australian federal police in October 2022, as he was exiting a supermarket in the NSW regional town of Orange. The former US marine has since been held in solitary confinement in various NSW maximum-security facilities. And a NSW magistrate greenlighted extradition on 24 May last year, with then AG Dreyfus giving the final approval on 20 December.

Similar to many ex-defence pilots, after leaving the military, Dan remained working in aviation, as a flight trainer and a consultant. In 2012, Duggan spent a number of months teaching at the Test Flying Academy of South Africa (TFASA), which included training foreign nationals, with the US then claiming in its indictment that he’d been involved in a conspiracy to train Chinese military personnel.

The 2017 US indictment alleges that Duggan was involved in a conspiracy with eight others to export US defence services in the form of flight training. The grand jury laid four charges against his name, including one count of money laundering, another of conspiracy to defraud and two counts of violating a US arms embargo targeting China.

But there’s a stark anomaly regarding the decision to greenlight extradition and that relates to the requirement for dual criminality to exist in order to progress an extradition from Australia, as per section 19(2)(c) of the Extradition Act 1988 (Cth).

This means that the conduct constituting a criminal offence in the foreign nation seeking extradition must too be a local crime at the time the extradition request is made.

Yet, as Duggan’s legal team, led by esteemed barrister Bernard Collaery, had raised with the former AG in a submission provided after the court approved extradition, a US affidavit attached to the 2017 indictment revealed that the jury requested a tolling period, or a pause to the five-year statute of limitations applying to the crimes, so that it could request evidence from the Australian government.

The grand jury was provided with a tolling period of 629 days. The period commenced on 8 August 2016, and the response from Australia arrived on 14 March 2018. Duggan’s lawyers further put it to Dreyfus that as no explanation was provided as to why the tolling period was requested, the only “reasonable inference” to make is that it was to ensure dual criminality was met.

Dual criminality was made out in respect of the offence of the provision of military-style training that involves a foreign principal, contrary to section 83.3 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth), which carries up to 20 years imprisonment. However, the dubious aspect about this is the legislation that created this offence didn’t pass until June 2018, long after the 2017 US indictment had been sealed.

This suspect scenario obviously didn’t provide former attorney general Dreyfus with reason to pause before greenlighting Duggan’s extradition, while recently appointed AG Rowland is apparently yet to have contemplated the case, and on 26 August a new judicial officer will be contemplating this circumstantial evidence on appeal for the first time.

Any and every whim of the US

However, the Duggans are facing another issue that’s placing a financial burden on covering the legal costs of Dan’s appeal, and that is that the AFP assisted the United States government in seizing a property owned by Saffrine Duggan on the NSW south coast. Washington claims the property was bought with the proceeds of crime, even though its owned by Dan’s wife.

The property that has a partially built house upon it was seized via a restraining order issued by a US District Court of Columbia judge in October 2023, and this order was subsequently approved and registered locally by the NSW Supreme Court.

This action was taken as Saffrine was listing the property for sale in order to cover Dan’s legal expenses.

So, currently, as her husband stews in prison for his 19th month straight, Saffrine is attempting to challenge the seizure of her property in the US court system, whilst raising further funds to cover the additional representation required for Dan’s appeal, as well as trying to raise six kids by herself.

A political pawn in the build up to war

The obvious question Duggan’s case raises is why would the US seek to criminalise and prosecute a former US marine currently living in Australia? And as principal lawyer and intelligence analyst at Cardinal Legal Dr Glen Kolomeitz told Sydney Criminal Lawyers back in August 2023, the entire case “reeks of politics”.

According to Kolomeitz, the sealing of the US indictment in 2017, coincided with the period when the US, the UK and Australia all began creating policies and passing laws aimed at framing “China as the adversary”, and claiming that Beijing was threatening western interests in the Indo Pacific region, with the point being to rally the civilian population behind a war against the East Asian giant.

Former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr made a similar point at an anti-AUKUS community meeting in March 2023, stating that he’d noticed the Australian media had commenced framing a China as an enemy to be feared in 2017, while former US Army colonel Lawrence Wilkerson told the same meeting his nation wants to war on China because it is threatening US economic hegemony.

In this same manner, stringing up the now 56-year-old ex-US marine and Australian citizen Dan Duggan before our nation, deeming him as some sort of traitor deserving punishment for colluding with the Chinese enemy, is yet another instance of primming the public for a war against China, and the Trump administration is currently insisting this conflict could be imminent.

So, while the issue of dual criminality failed to persuade former attorney Dreyfus that there was something rotten in the attempt to extradite Duggan, one would expect that if current AG Rowland doesn’t take the same nihilistic approach to being the nation’s chief lawmaker as her predecessor, she might see reason to reconsider extraditing the Australian father-of-six.

And while it’s quite likely the higher court will find the reasonable inference made in relation to the late criminalising of military-style training to achieve dual criminality as reason to end extradition, the particularly exceptional circumstances that have seen the nation requesting custody of Duggan having lately morphed into a lawless dictatorship might provide further reason to set him free.

Please donate to the Free Dan Duggan Chuffed fund, the MyCause fund or directly to the Free Dan Duggan campaign, in order to help cover the legal representation for the extradition appeal of the Australian father-of-six, as well as to assist with Saffrine’s battle in the US to regain control of her NSW south coast property