from Crikey .....

Australian human rights lawyer and WikiLeaks supporter Jennifer Robinson appears to have been placed on a travel watch list and was prevented from leaving the UK this morning until approval was secured from the Australian High Commission.

Robinson was returning to Australia to speak at the same conference as Attorney-General Nicola Roxon tomorrow - the Commonwealth Lawyers' Association's Regional Law Conference - on the apt subject of "Lawyers in the firing line". Roxon is giving an address on human rights.

Robinson was stopped when checking in at Heathrow early this morning Australian time and told she was an "inhibited person" and that approval from the Australian High Commission would be needed before she was allowed to proceed. She tweeted

Security guard: "you must have done something controversial" because we have to phone the embassy. "Certain government agencies" list.

Intriguingly, however, no Australian agency uses the term "inhibited person". A DIAC spokesman told Crikey "the only mechanism that would restrict uplift of a person to Australia is the Movement Alert List (MAL)."

The government doesn't discuss who is on the MAL, but it is understood it would be highly unusual for an Australian to be on the MAL.

This raises the possibility that, in spite of what she was told, Robinson was stopped not at the behest of an Australian agency but a foreign agency. In December, Robinson was in the US to monitor the pre-trial hearing of Bradley Manning and was sharply critical of the conduct of the hearing. In January, she confronted US Attorney-General Eric Holder about the Obama administration's treatment of WikiLeaks when both of them attended the Sundance Film Festival.

Robinson is currently en route to Hong Kong before travelling on to Sydney, where she is scheduled to arrive tomorrow morning.

A short time ago DFAT issued the following statement to Crikey:

"We are not aware of any Australian Government restriction applying to Ms Robinson's travel. As an Australian with a valid passport, she would be free to return to Australia at any stage. The UK border authorities or airline of travel may be able to provide further insight on claims that she was impeded from boarding her flight."

The DFAT statement is a reference to the fact that airlines themselves may stop people from boarding if they believe they may not be permitted to enter their destination country, leaving the airline with the cost of returning them to their point of departure. As Robinson is an Australian, however, this clearly would not have applied to her.

Crikey is seeking comment from the UK Border Agency.

meanwhile .....

After dodging and delaying FOI requests about its consideration of the case of Julian Assange for months, the government has blocked the release of any material that would reveal its internal legal deliberations over Assange's extradition to the United States.

Greens Senator Scott Ludlam made an FOI application to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Attorney-General's Department and their respective ministerial offices in December seeking documents relating to "the potential extradition or temporary surrender" of Assange to the US.

The response of the government has been a litany of excuses and self-justifications.

After several months, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is still seeking to avoid responding. In March, DFAT said it would take them a remarkable four months to process the request and demanded that Ludlam justify why a request for documents about Assange's extradition was a matter in the public interest. At the end of March, DFAT demanded another 30 days on top of the four months, on the basis that they'd only just realised they would have to consult with foreign governments over the request.

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet quickly fobbed off the request entirely by claiming that the request "would unreasonably divert the resources of the department", an excuse permitted under s.24 of the FOI Act.

So far only Attorney-General's has responded, after trying to unsuccessfully convince the Information Commissioner to re-extend the deadline for responding, and actually breaching the response deadline. The result (PDF), when it finally arrived in late March, featured extensive use of the famous black highlighter and bordered on nonsensical.

Among the treasures served up by Attorney-General's were:

Emails relating to AGD secretary Roger Wilkins questions about Assange's extradition, redacted to the point of meaninglessness, on the basis of "legal professional privilege";

• Detailed advice to Wilkins about Assange's extradition, including the issue of his facing the death penalty, was entirely redacted (legal professional privilege)
• A question time brief for Robert McClelland, in which both the talking points and the background material is almost entirely redacted because it "could cause damage to Australia's international relations"
• Emails between departmental staff about a request from McClelland's office for "lines" for use in response to possible questions about Assange after a newspaper article.
• Correspondence from people concerned about the issue and media articles
• Some of the Greens' own correspondence and notices of motion, one of which was bizarrely redacted despite being a public document.

The redactions prevent any assessment of what exactly the government knows about the US government's sealed indictment for Assange. The government has played dumb on the issue, publicly declaring it knows nothing about the matter, despite it apparently being common knowledge in Washington circles (as revealed by the Stratfor emails) that a sealed indictment against Assange had been issued.