McBride, currently in jail in Canberra, was sentenced by the ACT Supreme Court in May to more than five years’ imprisonment, with a non-parole period of two years and three months, following his theft and distribution of classified documents to three journalists at the ABC.

The disclosed materials were subsequently used in the production of ABC’s The Afghan Files, which investigated war crimes committed by Australian Defence personnel during the Afghanistan War.

He pleaded guilty to three charges related to the theft of 235 defence documents over 18 months between May 2014 and December 2016, with 207 of those documents classified as either secret or cabinet-in-confidence.

After hearing McBride’s appeal in March, the ACT Court of Appeal has now dismissed both arguments in McBride’s appeal: that the sentence was excessive and the judge’s ruling that he could not rely on the defence that he acted out of a duty to disclose the information, which came from the oath he took when joining the military.

Following this ruling, McBride’s legal team said they intend to appeal to the High Court, stating: “We believe that only the High Court can properly grapple with the immense public interest and constitutional issues at the heart of this case,” as reported by the ABC.

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“It is my own conscience and the people of Australia that I answer to. I have kept my oath to the Australian people,” McBride said in a statement made through his lawyers.

In response to the court’s decision, civil society groups, including the Human Rights Law Centre, the Whistleblower Justice Fund, and the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, have continued to call for urgent reform to Australia’s whistleblower protection framework.

Kieran Pender, associate legal director at the Human Rights Law Centre, criticised the prevailing legal framework that enables the criminal prosecution of whistleblowers.

“The truth should not be criminalised, yet Australia’s broken whistleblower protection laws have led to numerous whistleblowers being prosecuted for speaking up,” he said.

“The Albanese government must act with urgent law reform and the establishment of a whistleblower protection authority to ensure prosecutions like this never happen again. Whistleblowers should be protected, not punished.”

Tosca Lloyd, campaigner at the Whistleblower Justice Fund, added that “this is another dark day for David McBride and Australia’s democracy”.

“David was the first person to be prosecuted, and punished, for Australia’s war crimes in Afghanistan – the whistleblower, not a war criminal,” Lloyd said.

In May last year, the HRLC said McBride was the first whistleblower to be imprisoned in recent memory.

Witness K, who exposed Australia’s spying on Timor-Leste, was given a suspended sentence. His lawyer, Bernard Collaery, had his case dropped when Anthony Albanese took office.

This news comes shortly after whistleblower Richard Boyle pleaded guilty to four charges at a hearing in Adelaide earlier this week, related to his disclosures about the ATO’s aggressive debt collection tactics. Boyle’s case was called a “damning indictment” of Australia’s whistleblower protection laws.

A bill has been put forward to establish a whistleblower protection body in response to cases such as these, which is currently before the Senate.