00:00 I see someone who has been incarcerated for three years.
00:05 Chang Lei wrote last year that she gets 10 hours of sunshine a year in the years that
00:10 she was imprisoned.
00:12 She's here at home with her family.
00:14 I know there's been a very heartfelt reunion and I just want to say to her and to her entire
00:19 family our country is just so thrilled for them.
00:23 Stephen, what do we know about the circumstances of Chang Lei's release?
00:28 Very little at this stage and the Federal Government, perhaps because it's such a delicate
00:32 matter that involves so much painstaking negotiation, is very unwilling at this stage to provide
00:38 any details.
00:39 Now yesterday the Chinese Ministry of State Security said that Chang Lei had been essentially
00:45 sentenced to just under three years in jail after she pled guilty to "supplying state
00:52 secrets to an overseas entity".
00:54 Now what this entity allegedly is, exactly why the sentence was only two years and 11
01:01 months, pretty much matching precisely from the date of the time she was first detained
01:08 up until the present day just before the Prime Minister's visit to China, was not laid out.
01:13 The Chinese legal system is very opaque.
01:16 The assessment of most legal observers and most China observers here is essentially that
01:21 Chang Lei has been released because there was a political imperative to do so.
01:25 The Chinese government decided that they wanted to make a political concession to Australia
01:30 and therefore they argue we shouldn't put much stock in what the Chinese say is an independent
01:34 legal process.
01:35 Everyone who watches the Chinese system knows that this is effectively a decision that was
01:39 ordered from the top.
01:41 There's simply no independence of the legal system.
01:44 So this should primarily be seen as a political move rather than any sort of product of a
01:49 legal system, but exactly what those negotiations were, how the Australian government secured
01:55 her release, we simply don't know and it may take some time for some of those details to
02:00 come out.
02:01 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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