Dan Duggan Has Just Spent His Fourth Holiday Season in Prison Without Charge

Australian citizen Dan Duggan has just spent his fourth Christmas and New Year detained in a New South Wales prison at the behest of a United States extradition request that relates to an indictment, charging him with conspiring to export US defence services in the form of pilot training.

As of 1 January 2026, the total time Dan’s spent in prison is 3 years, 2 months and 11 days without any local charges against his name.

Duggan was a US marine for the 12 years to 2002, at which time he moved to Australia to become a permanent resident and then a citizen in 2012. The now 57-year-old married his Australian wife Saffrine, and they’ve been raising six Australian kids. Then, on 21 October 2022, some Australian federal police officers arrested Dan out the front of a supermarket in the regional town of Orange.

The US went on to produce a 2017 District Court of Columbia grand jury indictment, which charges Duggan with conspiring with other ex-military pilots to train Chinese military personnel to fly in South Africa in 2012. But Duggan is clear his students had been civilians, despite the indictment allegation that he violated the US ITAR arms embargo and also engaged in money laundering.

This bizarre case involving a citizen spending years on remand in NSW, without any chance to test the allegations against him in court, was progressed by the White House at a time when the US shifted towards framing China as a potential foe and in this rising cold war climate, action taken against Duggan for allegedly assisting Chinese military personnel, could serve as a cautionary tale to others.

Duggan just spent Christmas and New Year’s eve in the Macquarie Correctional Centre, and despite that being the case, there is still hope he will be returned to his wife and six kids, as Duggan appealed former attorney general Mark Dreyfus’ December 2024 decision to greenlight extradition to the USA in the Federal Court in Canberra in October, and the court outcome could change everything.

Tweaking the books for extradition

Duggan denies the claims he trained Chinese military personnel outright. He rather states that he trained Chinese civilians and other foreign nationals at the Test Flying Academy of South Africa in 2012. Another Australian pilot and western pilots of other nationalities were also working for TAFSA at the same time. However, none of them have been subjected to a criminal investigation.

Federal Court Justice James Stellio further heard that an affidavit that had been attached to the 2017 indictment, revealed that the grand jury had requested a tolling period, or a pause to the five-year statute of limitations that applied to the charges against Duggan in 2016. This was done in order to request some information from Australia, with the reply being issued on 14 March 2018.

The laws governing extradition in this country are held in the Extradition Act 1988 (Cth). Subsection 19(2)(c) of the Act requires that the conduct a foreign country is seeking to extradite an Australian citizen in response to must also be considered a criminal offence in this country. This is known as dual criminality.

To achieve dual criminality in the Duggan case, the US based it on the local offence of military-style training involving a foreign government principal, contrary to section 83.3 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth). Yet this offence was not created until June 2018, as part of a suite of espionage and foreign interference laws, which was the year after the indictment was sealed.

According to Cardinal Legal political analyst Dr Glenn Kolomeitz, who is part of the Duggan legal team, the only “reasonable inference” to come to in relation to the grand jury tolling period scenario is that the jurors wanted to pause because they needed to ensure that dual criminality was made out, and it appears that politicians here enacted this law in order to guarantee Duggan’s extradition.

A political prisoner

Speaking to in the upper house in 2024, Greens Senator David Shoebridge noted that Dan’s case raises questions around whether “Australian citizens can really be locked up indefinitely at the request of a foreign power”. However, as 2025 moves into 2026, the Duggan case now appears to be proof that at least when it comes to the United States, indefinite detention is par for the course.

Shoebridge further raised the fact that the indictment being created in 2017 was exactly the same time as the US started framing Beijing as a “strategic challenge”. The senator added that “it’s clear to many that this is a politicised extradition and prosecution”, with the dual aims of making China an example and having Australia placate the demands of its more senior AUKUS power.

The Albanese government has bent over backwards to permit the long-term detention of a father-of-six at the request of initially the Biden administration, but now on behalf of the authoritarian Trump administration. This is despite the fact that what the US alleges Duggan did in South Africa thirteen years ago, was not even a crime in this country at the time that he was accused of breaking the law.

Kolomeitz further told Sydney Criminal Lawyers in the early days of the case that the US indictment “reeks of politics”. He added that western powers started suggesting that Beijing was threatening western assets in the South Pacific circa 2017, and whilst British co-conspirators are listed in the indictment, there have been no arrests in the UK, in relation to flight training in South Africa.

Vassal state lamentations

Saffrine Duggan, Dan’s wife, has been campaigning for her husband’s release for the past 38 months. She and her supporters stress that the way in which the Australian government has incarcerated her husband at request of the White House reveals a loss of sovereignty on part of this nation. Saffrine is now in more than one million dollars debt, due to having to borrow to cover legal fees.

But the remanding of a citizen on no local charges for over three years is not the only example of loss of sovereignty, as the Australian federal police assisted the US courts in imposing a seizure order on a property that Saffrine owns on the NSW south coast. The US claims the place was bought with the proceeds of crime. And the sale of the property was meant to cover some of those legal fees.

“I’ve never had any trouble with the law my entire life,” Dan told the ABC’s 730 report from prison more than two years ago now. “I’m a real person. I am not some scoundrel or bad person who has done some horrible thing.”

“I’ve done nothing wrong.”