Julian Assange Wins A Major Battle in His Long War Against Punitive US Overreach

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Today, in the High Court in London, WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange secured a major legal victory in his long struggle against a blatantly unfair US extradition request, which seeks his extradition to the US to face espionage charges relating to the publication by WikiLeaks, in 2010 and 2011, of classified US files leaked by Chelsea Manning, a US private who had worked as an intelligence analyst in Iraq.

Assange’s victory today came when the High Court judges in his case refused to accept US assurances involving two aspects of the extradition request: his right not to be prejudiced against because of his nationality (he is an Australian citizen), and his entitlement to the protections of the US First Amendment, the guarantor of freedom of speech, and the bedrock of protection for journalists and publishers who make available classified information which it is in the public interest to know about, whether it embarrasses governments, or even exposes crimes that they hoped to keep hidden.

Assange’s long struggle against extradition began over five years ago, in April 2019, when he was arrested and taken to HMP Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in south east London, after the Ecuadorian government withdrew the asylum granted to him in June 2012, which had allowed to him to live, for nearly seven years, in the cramped confines of the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge.

President Obama, who had been the US president when the WikiLeaks files were published in 2010 and 2011, had wisely and appropriately concluded that seeking an extradition request for Assange to stand trial in the US would be an unacceptable infringement of the US’s cherished First Amendment rights, and would criminalize the freedom of the press.

Obama was ruthless in his pursuit of whistleblowers — like Chelsea Manning, although he ended up commuting her 35-year sentence and freeing her before he left office — but he and his administration recognized, I believe, that, inconvenient though it can be to have freedom of the press, it is fundamentally all that separates supposed democracies from dictatorships.

However, under Donald Trump, who had previously championed Assange, the US government cynically sought to sidestep the First Amendment problem; firstly, by inappropriately invoking the Espionage Act of 1917, introduced during the First World War to prevent support for enemies of the US in wartime; secondly, by suggesting that Assange had conspired with Manning in hacking into US government databases (for which no evidence exists); and, thirdly, through a legal sleight of hand that involved suggesting that, because of his nationality, First Amendment rights didn’t apply to him.

Today, the High Court ruled that the most recent US assurances regarding his nationality and his First Amendment rights — which involved the US government going no further than to suggest that he would be entitled to seek First Amendment Rights if extradited — were inadequate, and granted him leave to appeal.

This is hugely significant, and suggests to me that the US has run out of options, and should drop the extradition request, because the only way forward now is to fully acknowledge and recognize Assange’s First Amendment rights, which would mean that, in any trial on US soil, the entire world of journalism and publishing would be on trial alongside Julian Assange.

This, of course, has been the scandal of the case against Assange from the very beginning, because, in all of WikiLeaks’ releases — the Afghan and Iraq war logs, the diplomatic cables and the Guantánamo Files — the world’s major newspapers worked alongside WikiLeaks, publishing the files simultaneously, and all justifying their actions as publishing information, leaked by another source (Manning), that it was in the public interest to know about.

Singling out Julian Assange for punishment has always been illogical and fundamentally unacceptable, and was only possible because of the legal contortions undertaken under Donald Trump and maintained, to his shame, under President Biden.

To take just one example, the Guantánamo Files, consisting of 765 classified US military files, were released in April 2011. I worked as a media partner with WikiLeaks on the release of these files, as did the Daily Telegraph, the Washington Post, McClatchy, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El Pais, La Repubblica, L’Espresso and Aftonbladet.

Moreover, the Guardian and the New York Times, which had fallen out with Assange by this point, secured the files from another source, and attempted to pre-empt the release of the files by WikiLeaks and its other media partners by publishing them first — and while WikiLeaks and its media partners rallied swiftly, and Britain’s prominent Conservative broadsheet, the Daily Telegraph, published all the files immediately, WikiLeaks only released them in batches, a day at a time.

Who, in this story, is guilty of what? And why has Julian Assange been singled out for punishment, rather than the editors of the major newspapers who worked with him — or even sidelined him by acting independently — or, for that matter, myself, as the only individual who has worked with WikiLeaks as a media partner?

The answer, of course, is that the very foundation of the charges against Assange is a witch hunt, formulated by malignant officials in the Trump administration who let their rage at Assange’s undermining of them lead them into contorted legal efforts to extradite him while withholding First Amendment rights — alongside other devious actions, including spying on him, and proposing his assassination.

This has made a mockery of the US’s claims to respect press freedom, and freedom of speech, and the extradition request should have been dropped by President Biden as soon as he took office, but instead he and the Attorney General, Merrick Garland, have proceeded with a case that is so legally toxic and unsound that it resembles nothing less than an attempt to use the law to secure the “extraordinary rendition” of Julian Assange, denying him rights as fundamentally as the men “rendered” to CIA “black sites” and to Guantánamo, but in a legal context, so that he can prosecuted in a court of law in which he has been made a legal “enemy combatant.”

Throughout this whole sordid saga, which, sadly, is not over yet, despite Assange’s victory today, the fundamental inadequacy of the US-UK Extradition Treaty has been persistently exposed. For five years, Assange’s tenacious lawyers have fought to have a succession of UK courts — magistrates’ courts, the Old Bailey, and now the Royal Courts of Justice — recognize that the extradition request is fatally flawed, being political in intent, which is expressly prohibited under the terms of the Treaty.

That recognition has been persistently ruled out by judges (who have brought upon themselves accusations that their own rulings are politically motivated), as other avenues have opened up or been shut down. One judge ruled it was unsafe for Assange to be extradited because of the risk that he would commit suicide while being held in a Supermax prison. When that was overturned, efforts to focus on Assange’s perilous “exceptionalism” have finally secured what appears to be a genuinely significant victory after these long years of arrant injustice.

As a result of recent High Court rulings, the US government has been obliged to provide assurances that Assange would not be held in life-threatening conditions pending a trial, and will not face a stealthily introduced death penalty. Now, however, the assurances seem to have hit an impenetrable wall.

As Assange’s lawyers begin to prepare their appeal case — focusing on Assange’s nationality and the crucial importance of his First Amendment rights — the Biden administration should finally accept defeat, drop the extradition request, and allow Assange to be reunited with his family — his wife Stella, and their two children, whose only meetings with their father have been in the confines of Belmarsh prison.

Let Julian Assange be free!

Please follow the link below to listen to my song ‘Warriors‘ — about Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning — which was recorded with my band The Four Fathers, and released in February to coincide with hearings in the High Court. If you like it, please share it, and please also be aware that it is available to buy as a download.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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