A day earlier, police had raided the
Oakes on Thursday became the last of the trio to be cleared of charges.
Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Herron’s office had found there were “reasonable prospects” of convicting Oakes on the evidence of obtaining classified government information, a police statement said.
But after considering factors including the role of public interest journalism in Australia’s democracy, Herron’s office “determined the public interest does not require a prosecution in the particular circumstances of this case,” the statement said.
Clark was similarly cleared of charges in July over the same television investigation that he and Oakes broadcast in 2017 that alleged Australian troops had killed unarmed men and children in
Those allegations are still under police investigation.
Police announced in May that Smethurst would not be charged due to a lack of evidence.
She had reported in
“That the CDPP has reached the decision that prosecuting our journalists is not in the public interest only compounds what we have argued all along: Journalists in this country should not be prosecuted for doing their jobs and legislation needs to be changed to provide proper protection for journalists and their sources when they are acting in the public interest,” Anderson said in a statement.
Oakes described the three years since his report, “The Afghan Files," was broadcast as part of seven-part series as “very difficult.”
“While it's been difficult and it's had an impact on my family, I wouldn’t change the fact that we did these stories and that we tried to draw the public’s attention to them,” Oakes told
The police raids in June last year brought rival Australian media organizations together to demand more press freedom and guarantees that reporters would not risk jail over public interest journalism.
Media organizations argue that press freedoms have been eroded by more than 70 counterterrorism and security laws passed by
Critics accuse authorities of using national security as an excuse for threatening journalists over media revelations that are merely embarrassing to the government.
Critics also note that the raids came less than three weeks after Australia’s last election in which the conservative government narrowly retained power.
They argue that the timing suggested police wanted to protect the government from any political backlash from the journalist investigations which were widely described as an intimidation of media.
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