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extradition
Supporters Rally Behind Assange as UK Court Hears 'Pathetic' US Case
"Let me be very clear: This case is about journalism," said a campaigner with Reporters Without Borders. "It is about press freedom. If they make an exception of Julian Assange, the rule will be broken."
Feb 21, 2024
Supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange marched the streets of central London on Wednesday demanding his immediate release after U.S. government lawyers argued to the British High Court that the journalist should be extradited across the Atlantic to face espionage charges.
"How pathetic the U.S. case is," Stella Assange, the WikiLeaks founder's wife, told a crowd gathered outside Wednesday's court hearing, which represents the final legal avenue in the United Kingdom to prevent his extradition to the U.S.
"What they're trying argue is that state secrets trump revealing state crimes," Stella Assange said of U.S. lawyers. "This is the balance they're trying to shift. They want impunity, they don't want to be scrutinized, and journalism stands in the way."
BREAKING: @Stella_Assange explains the arguments laid out by the prosecution#FreeAssangeNOW pic.twitter.com/60M286NkMb
— Free Assange - #FreeAssange (@FreeAssangeNews) February 21, 2024
A decision in the case—which will decide whether Julian Assange can appeal his extradition—could be weeks, or even months, away.
If the British High Court rules that Assange can't appeal, his legal team is expected to ask the European Court of Human Rights to halt his extradition to the U.S., where Assange faces 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and a possible 175-year prison sentence.
United Nations experts, international human rights groups, and even one British judge have argued that extradition to the U.S. would put the 52-year-old publisher's life at grave risk. Assange was unable to attend this week's hearings or even follow them virtually due to his poor health, his lawyers said.
But global calls from
press freedom groups, the government of Assange's home country, and others for the U.S. Justice Department to drop the case and let the publisher go free have not moved the Biden administration, which decided to continue pursuing Assange's extradition after inheriting the case from the Trump administration—whose CIA reportedly considered kidnapping or assassinating the WikiLeaks founder.
During Wednesday's hearing, the U.S. government's lawyers
argued that Assange's decision to seek out and publish classified U.S. documents—some of which exposed American war crimes—went "far beyond" what could be characterized as journalistic conduct, an argument that many journalists have rejected.
"It is impossible to overstate the dangerous precedent Mr. Assange's indictment under the Espionage Act and possible extradition sets: Every national security journalist who reports on classified information now faces possible Espionage Act charges," Laura Poitras, a journalist and documentary filmmaker, wrote in a New York Timesop-ed in 2020. "It paves the way for the United States government to indict other international journalists and publishers. And it normalizes other countries' prosecution of journalists from the United States as spies."
Assange's lawyer, Edward Fitzgerald, similarly argued during the first day of the closely watched hearings on Tuesday that Assange is "being prosecuted for engaging in [the] ordinary journalistic practice of obtaining and publishing classified information, information that is both true and of obvious and important public interest."
Thousands marched through the streets to the office of the UK Prime Minister in Downing Street following the conclusion of Julian Assange's court hearing today, calling for his immediate release | via @MintPressNews #FreeAssange #FreeAssangeNOW pic.twitter.com/YIpjdoT65j
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) February 21, 2024
Rebecca Vincent, director of campaigns at Reporters Without Borders, said following Wednesday's hearing that "in these past two days, we have heard nothing new from the U.S. government."
"We have heard them double down on the same arguments that they've been making for 13 years," said Vincent. "Let me be very clear: This case is about journalism. It is about press freedom. If they make an exception of Julian Assange, the rule will be broken—and no one, no journalist, no publisher, no journalistic source, no media organization can ever be confident that their rights will be respected again."
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Days Before Extradition Hearing, Australian Parliament Tells US to Drop Assange Case
The vote "gives the government a real mandate to advocate very, very strongly for a political solution to bring Julian Assange home," said the journalist's brother.
Feb 15, 2024
As WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange awaits a two-day hearing before the United Kingdom's High Court next week on his possible extradition to the United States, lawmakers in his home country of Australia voted Wednesday in favor of pushing the U.S. and U.K. to allow Assange to return home instead.
"Enough is enough," said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese regarding the U.S. case against Assange, who published thousands of classified diplomatic and military documents in 2010 that included evidence of U.S. war crimes. "This thing cannot just go on and on and on indefinitely."
The prime minister joined 85 other lawmakers in voting for a motion proposed by Andrew Wilkie, an Independent member of the country's House of Representatives, to demand that the U.S. and U.K. drop the extradition effort and bring the case against Assange "to a close so that Mr. Assange can return home to his family in Australia."
Forty-two lawmakers opposed the measure.
Assange has been held at London's high-security Belmarsh Prison for the past five years, having been arrested for skipping bail in a separate legal matter.
In the U.S., he faces 17 espionage charges over WikiLeaks' publication of the classified documents.
In 2021, a U.K. judge ruled that the U.S. could not extradite Assange on the charges, saying prison conditions in the U.S. would endanger Assange's life. The journalist's physical and mental health has been in decline since his imprisonment, and he has suffered a mini-stroke, severe depression, and suicidal ideation, according to his attorneys.
The Biden administration appealed the decision, and the following year a court ruled that the extradition could proceed.
The High Court is set to hear Assange's case on February 20-21 to determine whether he should be granted a full appeal to challenge his extradition, and his family and other supporters fear that if he loses the appeal, the U.K. could send him to the U.S. before he has a chance to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.
Assange's wife, Stella Assange, said at a news conference on Thursday that the journalist could be on a plane to the U.S. "within days" if he loses the case.
"If he is extradited, he will die," she said.
On Wednesday, Amnesty International reiterated its call for the charges against Assange to be dropped, citing both "the risk of serious human rights violations" against him if he is held in the U.S. prison system and "a profound 'chilling effect' on global media freedom."
"The risk to publishers and investigative journalists around the world hangs in the balance. Should Julian Assange be sent to the U.S. and prosecuted there, global media freedoms will be on trial, too," said Julia Hall, Amnesty International's expert on counter-terrorism and criminal justice in Europe. "The public's right to information about what their governments are doing in their name will be profoundly undermined. The U.S. must drop the charges under the Espionage Act against Assange and bring an end to his arbitrary detention in the U.K."
Albanese said it is generally "not up to Australia to interfere in the legal processes of other countries, but it is appropriate for us to put our very strong view that those countries need to take into account the need for this to be concluded."
Speaking before Parliament ahead of the vote, Wilkie urged his colleagues to "stand for media freedom and the rights of journalists to do their jobs."
"Regardless of what you might think of Julian Assange," he said, "this has gone on too long... It must be brought to an end. And I'm confident that this Parliament can support this motion... It will send a very powerful political signal to the British government and the U.S. government."
Gabriel Shipton, Assange's brother, applauded Parliament for their show of support "at a crucial time" and said the vote "gives the government a real mandate to advocate very, very strongly for a political solution to bring Julian Assange home."
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Collateral Murder and the Persecution of Julian Assange
Perhaps the greatest crime that Julian Assange committed in the eyes of both Democratic and Republican governments was this: he dared to tell the American people some of the terrible things their government had done.
Feb 18, 2023
The first time I was asked to comment publicly on Julian Assange and Wikileaks was on MSNBC in April 2010. Wikileaks had just released the Collateral Murder video. The video, leaked by Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, was taken from the gunsight of a US Apache helicopter as the helicopter's crew killed 12 unarmed Iraqi civilians on a Baghdad street in 2007. Two Reuters journalists were killed and two small children were severely wounded (the Apache's crew killed the children's father as he attempted to assist wounded civilians). For three years, until Wikileaks released the video, the U.S. military claimed a battle had taken place and that aside from the two journalists, all the dead were insurgents.
The Army declared the journalists killed in the crossfire. The wounded children were ignored, even though the Apache's crew had recognized at the time they had shot children. "Well, it's their fault [for] bringing their kids to a battle." the helicopter pilots said on the video minutes after shooting them. There had been no battle.
In the studio, the MSNBC host asked another veteran and me for our thoughts on the video. Her question was about the apparent shock American audiences were experiencing watching the brutal reality of the Iraq War. We were both incredulous that more than seven years into the war, such a video would be shocking. What did you think we were doing over there?
The effects on the First Amendment and press freedom will be severe if Julian Assange is extradited and successfully prosecuted.
I went to war three times. I have seen mothers with their dead children and have heard their cries in Arabic, Pashto, and English. Those cries were all the same. The hell of war that has consumed men, women, and children for decades and continues in unending forms is unimaginable to many of us. Even harder to swallow is knowing these acts of organized murder and mass suffering, perpetrated in our names, were not cruel accidents of war but the result of planned and deliberate policies.
The millions of victims of the US wars throughout the Muslim World are familiar with the violence of these wars. For Americans at home, such familiarity with the wars, their violence, and the consequences, did not exist. Julian Assange and Wikileaks helped to change that.
For publishing the victims of the wars and war crimes caused by the U.S. and the West, Julian Assange is being held in Britain's notorious Belmarsh prison, awaiting extradition to the United States. Assange's harrowing captivity began more than 12 years ago when a US rendition forced him to seek sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. I had the privilege of meeting him there in 2014. That visit allowed me to thank him for his witness through Wikileaks for the millions of war victims ignored, unnamed, and rendered voiceless. Over a decade on, his mental and physical health is failing, and Biden, despite his commitment to press freedom, has yet to budge on a pardon.
New York Times Vietnam war correspondent Neil Sheehan said the Pentagon Papers taught him that secrets were not kept by a government to protect its people from adversaries but rather to protect the government's actions from the knowledge of its people. Perhaps this is the greatest crime that Julian Assange committed in the eyes of both Democratic and Republican governments: he dared to tell the American people what their government had done.
The effects on the First Amendment and press freedom will be severe if Julian Assange is extradited and successfully prosecuted. His persecution and torture already serve as a warning to journalists worldwide. And morally, Julian Assange’s imprisonment obstructs any reckoning we in the U.S. must do to contend with our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and their victims.
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