Dan Duggan Makes Final Appeal Against Trumped Up US Extradition Request

Australian citizen Dan Duggan will appear in Federal Court on Thursday, 16 October 2025, as he appeals the decision to greenlight his extradition to the United States based on a 2017 District Court of Columbia grand jury indictment that charges the ex-US marine pilot with crimes he disputes, including a criminal offence that wasn’t even a crime here at the time he’s said to have committed it.

Duggan was one of three Australians who worked for the Test Flying Academy of South Africa in 2012. However, the 57-year-old father-of-six Australian children is the only one who’s been held on remand by Corrective Services NSW for the last three years, without a single local charge against his name, and based upon assertions of a first Trump administration indictment that cites no evidence.

Duggan was a US marine pilot for the 12 years to 2002, at which time he moved to Australia, married his wife Saffrine and became naturalised in 2012. But he’s now being remanded, as the US charges him with conspiring with other ex-military pilots to provide US defence services in the form of flight training to Chinese military personnel, which is said to have been in violation of a US arms embargo.

Former Australian attorney general Mark Dreyfus approved the extradition process on 28 December 2022, while he approved extradition on 20 December 2024. After Dreyfus delivered both decisions during the holiday season, Albanese appointed a new chief lawmaker, Michelle Rowland, in May this year, and she now claims to be powerless to save the Australian father from deportation.

Duggan’s case further highlights the flawed extradition system that results in local citizens being remanded without charge or any locally tested evidence for years on end, with the clincher being that it appears Australia conspired with the US in order to legislatively facilitate Dan’s extradition, via a 2018 Criminal Code amendment, as his alleged crime had not been an offence here.

Facilitating extradition after the fact

The appeal of the extradition of Dan Duggan to the United States will be heard in the Federal Court in Canberra on Thursday from 10.15 am onwards. NSW Magistrate Daniel Rees greenlighted extradition in Sydney’s Downing Centre Local Court in May 2024. And after considering a submission provided by Dan’s esteemed barrister Bernard Collaery, Dreyfus approved extradition last Christmas.

Duggan’s legals assert the claims that he was in a conspiracy with other ex-military personnel to train Chinese air force pilots are false. They maintain that Duggan trained Chinese civilians and other foreign nationals to fly at TFASA circa 2012. This was done alongside other Australian and western ex-military pilots, who have not been the subject of criminal investigations or extradition requests.

Some of the most vital evidence contained in the Duggan submission was the conclusion that it came to in respect of an affidavit that was attached to the 2017 indictment, as it outlined that during the 2016 grand jury hearings relating to the Australian citizen, the jurors requested a tolling period, or a pause to the five-year statute of limitations that applied to the charges laid against Duggan.

The Extradition Act 1988 (Cth) governs extraditions in Australia. Subsection 19(2)(c) of the Act requires that the conduct the country seeking extradition over must be a criminal offence in local law at the time that the foreign nation makes the request. This stipulation is known as dual criminality. A tolling period of 629 days was granted.

The US based its dual criminality on the 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 passed into law until June 2018, as part of the National Security Legislation Amendment (Espionage and Foreign Interference) Bill 2018, which was the year after the indictment was sealed.

Cardinal Legal political analyst Dr Glenn Kolomeitz, who is part of the Duggan legal team, maintains that the only “reasonable inference” to be made in relation to the grand jury’s request for a tolling period was that it wanted to ensure that dual criminality was made out. So, Duggan’s extradition is based on what his lawyers assert is a purposefully “manufactured law”.

Another anomaly involved in Duggan’s case is that the 1976 Treaty on Extradition between Australia and the USA specifically governs extraditions at the behest of the White House and it was enacted in line with US constitutional guarantees, which include those against retrospective criminalisation, or ex post facto laws. This process, therefore, appears unconstitutional under US law.

A pawn in the war on China game

Kolomeitz further told Sydney Criminal Lawyers in 2023 that the US indictment “reeks of politics”. The lawyer elaborated that the document lays it on thick to imply that Duggan was involved in some conspiracy with a rising China, and at the same time, Kolomeitz notes that the US and its western allies were shifting towards a more aggressive approach to China with a view to a future war.

Former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr told a March 2023 anti-AUKUS community meeting in Marrickville that he noted a shift in the approach the Australian mainstream media and federal ministers were taking towards China in 2017, as they framed the East Asian giant as adversary. The fostering of this ‘China panic’ was being done purposefully and continues to this day.

Greens Senator David Shoebridge also told SCL in 2023 that he didn’t think it was just a coincidence that the Duggan saga occurred at the same time as the Australian government was trying to “persuade the Australian public to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on US and UK weaponry targeted at China”, which included the fabled Australian-owned nuclear-powered AUKUS subs.

Punishing the Duggan family

Commentators critical of the overbearing relationship that Australia has with the United States underscore that the White House simply making the request that this nation not only hand over one of its citizens based on unproven statements in an indictment, but further that it should hold him in remand for three entire years, reveals a loss of sovereignty on the part of this nation.

A further sacrifice of control was indicated when the Australian federal police assisted the US courts in imposing a seizure order upon a NSW south coast property that Saffrine Duggan owns, as Washington claims that the property was bought with the proceeds of crime. This has caused the Duggans much financial hardship, as they’d sought to sell the property to fund Dan’s legal fees.

The glaring difference with the Duggan extradition process is that since the time the courts and the attorney general signed off on extradition, the second Trump presidency has taken office and is now in full swing, and it has involved increasing shifts towards authoritarian rule in the US, and neither of the prior decisionmakers in this case made their determination when fascist forces were in power.

“Unfairly, we don’t have an opportunity in the Australian court system to argue the details of the case – the serious errors of fact,” said Saffrine Duggan, on the day before her husband’s appeal. “We can only argue about the errors made during the extradition process, and there are a number of serious errors that clearly show that Dan, an Australian citizen, was not treated lawfully.”

“As a nation, we need to protect the rights of all Australians, our citizens, from overreach from foreign nations and to bring Dan home. My hope is that justice and fairness prevail.”

Duggan’s supporters, including the Alliance Against Political Prosecutions, will be gathering outside the Federal Court of Australia in Canberra at 9 am on 16 October 2025 to call for the release of the Australian father-of-six