Now he is revealed as the father of two children born in Britain with a woman he will shortly marry, he can add the right to family life (an aspect of the right to privacy) to the objection to his forceful removal. He already has evidence that the CIA secretly live-streamed his meetings with his lawyers, in breach of the rules of legal confidentiality and of European privacy laws, and his fiancee avers that one of the embassy guards confessed to her (because he found it so disgusting) that he had been tasked to steal her baby’s nappies so the poo could be analysed to check whether Assange was the father.

Another objection is the way in which the US is breaching its own much-touted right to free speech and is discriminating against Assange because he is Australian and not American. It is inhibited by the First Amendment to the US constitution from prosecuting US publishers (like The New York Times, which disseminated the Wikileaks revelations) but the Trump lawyers now argue that this clause only protects publishers who are American citizens.

That makes all Australian investigative journalists, and those from other countries, whether or not they work for US media, vulnerable to extradition if they publish military or diplomatic secrets. We actually have an illustrious tradition of journalists who have exposed military misbehaviour – beginning, let us remember, with Keith Murdoch during World War I. One of our finest, the late Phil Knightly (author of Truth – The First Casualty) stood bail for Assange. When it was ordered to be forfeited, he said it was money well spent.

The most immediate danger to Assange, with his chronic lung condition, is coronavirus. Prisons are hotbeds and have already had eight deaths so thousands of non-violent offenders are being released on parole to avoid their exposure. But parole is not on offer for Assange. His 50-week sentence for breaching it by seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy is now over and last month he made an application, offering to put himself under house arrest (well, mansion house arrest) in the country, with ankle restraints and electronic monitors and an array of restrictions that would have made it impossible for him to flee anywhere. His application was brusquely rejected.