Britain rules against the US’s appeal for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to be extradited to the states.
Julian Assange, 49, an Australian publisher, editor and activist is best known for co-founding the website, WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks publishes news leaks and other classified information provided by anonymous sources and has lead to Assange being under investigation over breaches of confidentiality since 2009.
A brief timeline of his history:
April 2010: WikiLeaks and Assange shot to fame after it released a video of a US military Apache helicopter flying over and killing more than a dozen Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists.
He also published leaks regarding the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video and Cablegate. The US government launched a criminal investigation into the website after this. The Baghdad airstrikes were attacks conducted by two helicopters during the Iraqi insurgency which followed the Iraq War. This was a US-led invasion and showed the crew firing on a group of men and killing several of them. The footage sparked a global discussion on the legality and morality of the attacks. A cable is a confidential text-based message exchanged between a diplomatic mission and the foreign ministry of its parents’ country.
Cablegate was the United States diplomatic cables leak which began on 28th November 2010 when WikiLeaks began releasing classified cables that had been sent to the US State Department by 274 of its consulates, embassies, and diplomatic missions globally. The 251, 287 cables consisted of 261, 276, 536 words, according to WikiLeaks making Cablegate the largest set of confidential documents to be published into the public domain.
November 2010: Sweden issues an international arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of sexual assault. He breached bail and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in June 2012. Assange walked in there on 19th June 2012 claiming diplomatic asylum which was granted. Diplomatic asylum is the asylum which a state grants to a fugitive in its embassy situated within the territory of another state.
Ecuador granted him asylum on the grounds of political persecution.
2016: WikiLeaks publishes confidential Democratic Party emails during the US election campaign time. The emails showed that the party’s national committee was favouring Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the primaries.
2018: Robert Mueller charged 12 Russian intelligence officers with computer hacking and working with WikiLeaks.
11th April 2019: Assange’s asylum was withdrawn following disputes with the Ecuadorian authorities. He was arrested, found guilty of breaching the Bail Act and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison.
23rd May 2019: the US government charged him with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. This act is a federal law passed in 1917 that is intended to prohibit interference with military operations. Espionage is the practice of spying or of using spies, typically by the government to obtain political and military information. Also, computer crime laws on multiple counts of conspiring with and directing others, from 2009 to 2019 to illegally obtain and release US state secrets.
2019: Sweden dropped the investigation due to the amount of time that had passed.
4th January 2021: District Judge Vanessa Baraitser rules against the US’s request to extradite him and stated that doing so would be oppressive for reasons of his mental health.
What is happening now?
“there is a risk Assange be driven to suicide if he were to serve his sentence in an American prison.”
President Biden intends to have him stand trial on espionage and hacking-related charges, mostly relating to WikiLeaks publication of hundreds of thousands of US military and diplomatic documents. If convicted of all counts, he faces a jail sentence of up to 175 years.
He would be standing on trial in the US, however British judge, Vanessa Baraitser of Westminster Magistrates’ court denied his extradition- saying that there is a risk Assange be driven to suicide if he were to serve his sentence in an American prison.
The case is complicated: human rights and civil liberties groups have asked the acting attorney general, Monty Wilkinson, to abandon the effort to prosecute Assange, arguing that the Trump administration developed against him could establish a precedent posing a grave threat to press freedoms.
Amnesty International USA are just one of such groups that have voiced their opinion, calling on Biden to drop charges against Assange. One paragraph from a letter they sent reads as follows:
“While our organizations have different perspectives on Mr Assange and his organization, we share the view that the government’s indictment of him poses a grave threat to press freedom both in the United States and abroad. We urge you to drop the appeal of the decision by Judge Vanessa Baraitser of the Westminster Magistrates’ Court to reject the Trump administration’s extradition request.”
Rebecca Vincent, the director of international campaigns for organisation Reporters Without Borders, said the group was extremely disappointed that the Biden Justice Department was pressing the effort to bring Assange to the United States for prosecution.
She said: “This marks a major missed opportunity for President Biden to distance himself from the Trump administration’s terrible record on press freedom.”
Ms Vincent warned: “The U.S. government is creating a dangerous precedent that will have a distinct chilling effect on national security reporting around the world. No journalist, publisher or source can be confident that they wouldn’t be criminally pursued for similar public interest reporting.”
Again, to look back at the history under different presidents: during the Obama administration, they were deliberating whether to charge Assange but worried that doing so would raise First Amendment (right to free speech) Issues and could establish a precedent that could damage press freedoms in the United States, especially since news organisations such as The New York Times sometimes publish information deemed to be classified.
The Trump administration moved forward with Assange’s prosecution, even though Obama never charged him. Firstly, he was accused of hacking conspiracy but then filed a superseding indictment charging him under the Espionage Act.
What does Biden think?
In 2019, when Biden was seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, he was asked by The Times if he would keep the Espionage charges that the Trump administration had brought or not. He refrained from taking a stance but was careful to draw a line between journalistic activities and hacking.
“Journalists have no constitutional right to break into a government office, or hack into a government computer, or bribe a government employee, to get information,” Mr Biden wrote, adding, “we should be hesitant to prosecute a journalist who has done nothing more than receive and publish confidential information and has not otherwise broken the law.”
District Judge Baraitser said he was “a depressed and sometimes despairing man’ and if imprisoned in the US he “faces the bleak prospect of severely restrictive detention conditions designed to remove physical contact and reduce social interaction.”
Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said he was ready to offer political asylum to Assange and supported the decision of the British court.
“Assange is a journalist and deserves a chance, I am in favour of pardoning him”, Lopez Obrador told his regular news conference.
For now, he is expected to remain in jail in the UK, though the case could eventually lead to the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court.
Amelia Cutting
Featured image courtesy of Svenn Sivertssen on Flickr. Image license found here. No changes were made to this image.