ACT Supreme Court lists trial of lawyer Bernard Collaery for October

On Thursday morning, ACT Supreme Court registrar Jayne Reece set Collaery's trial down to start on October 24.

Ms Reece did so in accordance with orders made last week by Justice David Mossop, who expressed a desire to "terminate procedural effort" and progress the long-running case.

Collaery, 77, is pleading not guilty to five charges alleging breaches of the Intelligence Services Act.

Four of the charges allege the Canberra lawyer illegally revealed classified information in media interviews.

The other accuses him of conspiring with his former client, the ex-Australian Secret Intelligence Service spy known as Witness K, to communicate such information to the government of East Timor.

The charges concern the public exposure of a 2004 espionage operation, which involved Australian spies bugging a government building in East Timor during sensitive negotiations about lucrative oil and gas reserves.

The case against Collaery kicked off in December 2013, when Australian Security Intelligence Organisation operatives raided his home and office.

At the time, he was in The Hague to represent East Timor as it took action against Australia in the Permanent Court of Arbitration.

Collaery was later summonsed to appear in the ACT Magistrates Court in September 2018.

Since then, his case has been bogged down in the Supreme Court by battles with successive federal attorney-generals, who have sought to have significant parts of his trial closed to the public under national security information laws.

The long-running saga left Justice Mossop, who described one aspect of the fight as "another front in [a] greater war", to ask last November if the matter would ever finish.

The judge lamented "processes which never seem to end" as he wondered whether the case would just get "stuck in a perpetual vortex".

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Justice Mossop put his foot down last week, ordering that the matter be listed before Ms Reece for the purpose of fixing trial dates.

One of Collaery's barristers, Phillip Boulten SC, resisted the case being sped up on Thursday.

"Setting this matter down for trial at the moment is against the desires and wishes of the accused, I must say," Mr Boulten told Ms Reece.

Both he and prosecutor Christopher Tran raised difficulties in terms of their availability on proposed trial dates later this year, but Mr Boulten acknowledged that Ms Reece was "probably tied" by the orders Justice Mossop had made.

Ms Reece ultimately set the trial dates, noting the matter had an estimated duration of four or five weeks.

The dates may yet have to change, with Mr Boulten indicating the trial would take much longer than that if a preliminary appeal listed in July was upheld.

Witness K, who pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge, was sentenced last year to a suspended three-month jail term.

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