The case of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is complex, containing elements of law, freedom of speech and of the media, journalism, politics, international relations and health. In the recent hearing to determine whether Assange should be extradited to the US, health became the dominant discourse. He may die if several Western governments do not stop persecuting him.
Assange is seriously mentally ill. The magistrate in the extradition proceeding decided he could not be extradited to the US because if he were, it was highly likely he would die by suicide. Other aspects of the legal reasoning in that judgment were open to criticism, but this one wasn’t.
Assange is a political prisoner, having been locked up for 10 years at the behest of the governments of the US, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Ecuador and, because of its neglect of his cause, Australia.
Assange was the director of Wikileaks at the time it released a hoard of US government documents revealing details of American political and military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some quarter of a million documents were involved. Extracts were published in association with the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde and El Pais. The US went after Assange, not the newspaper editors.
Wikileaks was not in league with any nation that was America’s enemy. It sought to expose to the world the nefarious and sometimes deadly activity in which the US and, later, other governments had engaged. It acted like any journalist with a brief to investigate matters of national security might have done. It disclosed classified documents in the public interest so that news organisations could report on their content and the public could make evidence-based assessments as to the propriety of the actions that had been revealed.
Nevertheless, the US government argued that the documents’ disclosure might have caused serious damage. The contention was that in releasing the trove of documents, Wikileaks had endangered the work and the lives of local people who had acted as informers on behalf of the US government and its allies.
It has not been widely reported, however, that the US government commissioned an internal investigation to study the effect of the disclosures and to produce a list of people who might have been killed because of the revelations. After an exhaustive examination, the team of 120 counter-intelligence operatives, under the direction of Brigadier Robert Carr, determined that it had not been able to find a single person who had died as a result of the Wikileaks releases.
Despite this finding, even as late as the recent UK extradition hearing, the US government has continued to assert that a number of of its military collaborators and citizen informers had been killed or injured as a result of Wikileaks’ disclosures.
Assange had been working for some time in the UK. However, his freedom ended not long after the document dump in 2010. The cause was allegations of rape brought against him by prosecutors in Stockholm. The Swedish Government sought his extradition from the UK to answer questions in relation to alleged offences that had occurred during two separate episodes of sexual intercourse with women while in the Swedish capital.
Apart from those involved no one knows exactly what happened on those two evenings. The stories of the participants are starkly opposed. Assange claimed his innocence from the outset. The two complainants’ accounts could not be dismissed. That said, Swedish prosecutors eventually discontinued all relevant criminal proceedings. Assange was neither tried nor convicted of rape or any other sexual misdemeanour.
The significance of these events lies not in the facts about the sexual interactions, however, but in the extradition proceedings that emerged from them. As soon as the Swedish Government initiated extradition proceedings, the UK Government took Assange into detention. There followed an extraordinary series of events.
Assange was desperately afraid that if he were extradited to face charges in Sweden, no matter what the outcome, the Swedish Government would send him on to the US to face prosecution in relation to Wikileaks’ activities in publishing classified information. The focus of US attention remained upon the Iraq/Afghanistan revelations. The US Government denied it intended to charge Assange but, drip by drip, news leaked out that a Grand Jury had been convened to determine what criminal charges he would face if returned to the custody of US authorities.
To avoid extradition to the US, Assange skipped bail in the UK and took up asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. This foreshadowed a personal disaster. The UK Government established a permanent police presence outside the Embassy and made it clear Assange would be arrested as soon as he tried to leave it.
Inside the Embassy, he had two rooms, one tiny living room and an equally tiny bathroom. His stay at the Embassy lasted seven years. He could not go outside. He was deprived of fresh air, sunlight, the ability to move and exercise freely and access to medical care. The UK Government refused to allow his transfer to a teaching hospital for medical treatment. Doctors were discouraged from visiting him at the Embassy. It was as if he were in solitary confinement.
Foreign governments placed immense pressure on Ecuador to allow them to engage in surveillance. Assange was subject to constant watch. He was surveilled in private and with visitors, including family, friends, journalists, lawyers and doctors. His rights to privacy, freedom of speech, legal professional privilege and doctor-patient care were consistently violated. After some years of confinement, his health began to deteriorate.
In 2015, the United Nations Committee on Arbitrary Detention determined that Assange’s confinement inside the Embassy constituted a grave breach of his right to be free from arbitrary detention. It observed that he had been denied the opportunity to defend himself against the Swedish allegations; the duration of his detention had been incompatible with the presumption of innocence; he had been denied the right to contest the necessity and proportionality of his arrest, and his detention for five years had put his health at serious risk.
In a letter to The Lancet, 117 British doctors complained that Julian had been treated cruelly and suffered medical neglect. They said:
“We condemn the torture of Assange. We condemn the denial of his fundamental right to appropriate health care. We condemn the climate of fear surrounding the provision of health care to him. We condemn the violations of his right to doctor-patient confidentiality. Politics cannot be allowed to interfere with the right to health and the practice of medicine.”
Following a change of government in Ecuador in 2018, Assange was dragged by London police from the Ecuadorian Embassy and locked up in Britain’s notorious Belmarsh prison along with the nation’s most dangerous criminals. He had pleaded guilty to breaching bail and was sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment.
After he was detained by the UK, the US Government finally showed its hand. It charged him with 17 counts of violating the US Espionage Act. His ‘espionage’ consisted of releasing the original trove of Iraq/Afghan files. Among other things, these files disclosed alleged war crimes, the deaths of civilians at the hands of American troops, the infliction of torture, arbitrary detention and governmental corruption. Wikileaks had provided crucial information upon which news organisations and citizens around the world could discern the morass of the Middle-East war.
The Espionage Act defines the unauthorised publication of national defence or classified information as a felony. Critically, it does not allow for a public interest defence. That means a jury is barred from taking into account the difference between a whistleblower exposing government crimes to the press, and a spy selling state secrets to a foreign government.
The prosecution constitutes a grave threat to independent journalism. Every national security journalist who reports on US classified information now faces possible espionage charges. It paves the way for the US government to indict other international journalists and publishers. It normalises other countries’ prosecution of journalists as spies.
A few weeks ago, a UK magistrate refused the US Government’s request that Assange be extradited for trial. She did so because of the risk he might suffer grave damage to his mental health. He was not granted bail, however, and remains in Belmarsh.
Assange’s mental state is critically compromised. It was clear, for example, that he could not properly comprehend the nature and content of his extradition hearing late last year. Following a detailed examination of his situation in Belmarsh prison, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment reported that the cumulative effect of his shocking treatment over a decade had constituted psychological torture. His conclusion was damning:
“In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and persecution, I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up deliberately to isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.”
His detention must end – now.
Spencer Zifcak is Emeritus Professor of Law and Allan Myers Chair of Law at the Australian Catholic University.
Comments
25 responses to “Western governments will have blood on their hands unless they stop persecuting Julian Assange”
Julian Assange is a man of heroic proportions bullied by the murderer state the US and further bullied by the variously led PM governments of Australia – and by the places which boast of their hundreds of years of “democracy” revealed as hollow. Chelsea Manning Ed Snowden, Julian Assange, Bernard Collaery, Witness K and more – bullied for being truth-tellers. I will not be happy till Howard, Downer, Gillard, Rudd, Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison serve even if collectively the length of time in which Julian has suffered!
The author is giving the impression that he’s not aware of that disgruntled former Wikileaks employee Daniel Domscheit was responsible for the 2010 document dump known as Cablegate.
Julian Assange even warned the US about it.
www DOT youtube DOT com/watch?v=lfZQcV-frnY&feature=youtu.be
What of all the material Assange published did he or anyone else hack?
This is indeed a complex issue. IMO it’s time Assange’s more ideologically motivated supporters stopped exploiting him to run their political campaigns. He needs to do a plea bargain, which I suspect the incoming US government would seriously entertain. It’s time this fetid saga came to a reasonable end.
However, as this article points out, WikiLeaks dumped 100’s of thousands of unverified / uncorroborated documents straight onto the Internet. Whether or not this resulted in collateral deaths is immaterial – the risk was there.
Assange is said to be mentally ill. One might ponder whether this was a pre-existing condition. He had a checkered history prior to WikiLeaks. If we emptied gaols of people suffering a mental illness they’d have far fewer inmates.
What Assange did cannot be justified as journalism. He is a whistleblower and on that basis he deserves better treatment. But not necessarily unqualified glorification.
For what its worth i agree entirely. For a libertarian Assange has spent a long time in appellate courts and losing. Its time it ended. He is a whistleblower just as the enormously courageous Chelsea Manning is. She was pardoned by Obama after serving seven years. It is the only viable path for Assange now. The approach to Trump by some of his supporters can only harm his chances with Biden and the Democrats.
No he’s not a whistleblower.
You are technically right. He assisted a genuinely courageous woman who is the most important whistleblower since Ellsberg. Have it your way. Assange is a relatively secondary agent in the exposure by Chelsea Manning of horrendous war crimes against the Iraqi people. War crimes are illegal state conduct. Still he must not be extradited to the US gulag and his life protected. As for the rest lets agree to disagree.
Lets agree to join forces and continue fighting for Julians Assange’s freedom.
The appeal process is to take place in a different court than the biased Vanessa Baraitser reading her instructions from a laptop.
The extradition appeals go from the Magistrates’ Court to the High Court – lets hope they take their role more seriously and give Julian Assange his freedom.
Yes its imperative he doesnt get sent to the US gulag. Biden and the war machine will be very determined to get their hands on him. There is one glimmer of hope in that UK High Court judges have been critical of US torture in the past.
Justice Collins in the 2006 case of Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, and Omar Deghayes said:
“America’s idea of what is torture is not the same as ours and does not appear to coincide with that of most civilised nations.”
In “R (Binyam Mohamed) v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs” the High Court took decisions critical of torture. Basically the UK appellate courts have had a chequered history in regard to torture particularly very weak in regard to the British atrocities in Northern Ireland. But the UK courts have taken strong decisions after Afghanistan and Iraq.
This link sets out some of those decisions which you might find interesting and helpful.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1468-2230.12578
The UK Appeal Court resisted US pressure in Binyam Mohamed summarised here:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/02/biny-f13.html
Another article on Julian Assange, another negative comment that seems at odd with your wish for clemency for Assange.
Firstly, if you have definitive evidence that Wikileaks publications directly resulted in “collateral deaths”, in contrast to the findings noted by Prof Zifcak that an internal US investigation found none, please present it. In an article published 17 September, 2020, Craig Murray reported first hand the testimony placed before District Judge Baraitser by John Goetz (now Chief Investigations Editor of German public TV, but with Der Spiegel in 2010 when work on the Afghan War Logs was undertaken): “Julian Assange had been most concerned to find the names in the papers. He spent a lot of time working out technical ways to identify names in the tens of thousands of documents. Mark Summers (QC, for Assange) asked if he had been looking for the names for the purpose of redaction, and Goetz confirmed it was for redaction. He had interviewed Assange on the harm minimisation programme of the operation.” Thus, Assange was resolutely scrupulous in vetting the publication of data. It appears the Guardian journos were not so careful.
Secondly, you deny Assange is a journalist. Well, you were one, and that is your opinion. Is it relevant? Lots of other journalists have identified Assange as one of them, and Wikipedia’s article on him has an impressive list of awards that appear to have a couple for journalism. Further, the point has been made that in a sense Wikileaks has redefined journalism in the internet age: once, we relied on a journalist’s opinion – we trusted them. Now, we see the data. For ourselves. Is that a problem?
Yes, it’s a problem if it contains personal and private information, matters of national security, etc.
“The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.” Tweet, Julian Assange, 5 August 2017.
I don’t disagree with that proposition. That’s why we need whistleblower laws that protect people who expose wrongdoing, but not the wholesale leaking of anything a hacker gets their hands on.
Who has hacked what, where’s the evidence for your claim?
I don’t think even WikiLeaks denies that files were hacked.
All that’s missing is a comma after think and that reply would take on a completely different meaning – however you didn’t – you’re implying something happened while failing to provide a scintilla of verifiable evidence.
Wikileaks doesn’t hack – [I’m able to back that up with independently verifiable evidence.]
Yet that is what you’re implying – if you happen to have access any independently verifiable evidence you should provide it without delay or continue looking like an ignorant tool.
For someone who claims to be a ”political adviser” – You don’t think or communicate very well.
Be specific – Which files are you referring to?
Remember that you were politely asked to provide evidence for your claim – if you’re not able to just say so and we’ll leave it at that – unless you continue making more false accusations – then we’ll have to have another little conversation.
Exposing war crimes is what I would regard as proper journalism.
Those who have provided material to WikiLeaks are by definition Whistleblowers – not the publisher.
Perhaps Assange’s supporters would have more credibility if some of his backers weren’t lobbying the fascist Trump to pardon him. Lie down with dogs.
Perhaps in balance in regard to the sex crime allegations against Assange it could be mentioned that that one charge lapsed due to statute of limitations and that Assange was never interviewed primarily to his deliberately evading a European warrant for his arrest. A warrant that was upheld by the High Court of the UK.
That said i agree he should be released and protected from the US gulag.
For people who have ingested years of anti-Assange propaganda from several governments, media organisations, and individual journalists, and believe them, Professor Zifcak’s piece is essential corrective reading. But he didn’t correct Luke Harding and David Leigh’s false claims, echoed below by Laurie Patton, that Assange ‘dumped’ unredacted documents ‘straight onto the Internet’. Judge Baraitser accepted them too, and would not consider the defence evidence showing that he didn’t. Journalists Andrew Fowler and Mike Davis agree, and should have been called as witnesses. Legal systems that can be used to do punish Assange in this way will do it to anyone, which is the point the UK and US authorities apparently want to make.
According to the BBC: “Since it launched in 2006, Wikileaks has become renowned for publishing thousands of classified documents covering everything from the film industry to national security and wars”.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47907890
According to Wikipedia: “Since 2006, the document archive website WikiLeaks has published anonymous submissions of documents that are typically unavailable to the general public”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_material_published_by_WikiLeaks?wprov=sfti1
According to Euronews: “The website has released numerous troves of documents, known as data or information dumps, in its 15 years of being active. Some of the most famous are 400,000 secret military reports relating to the war in Iraq, and a further 90,000 on Afghanistan”.
https://www.euronews.com/2021/01/04/what-is-wikileaks-what-did-julian-assange-do-why-do-the-us-want-to-extradite-him
Indeed they did publish all that. These documents were collected at taxpayers’ expense. Much of the trove was classified to spare governments the embarrassment of taxpayers knowing what they were up to, including in illegal wars which taxpayers also financed. Are other journalists and publishers jealous?
So, you’re arguing that any information collected at the taxpayers’ expense should be freely available to everyone? Your tax returns? The details of commercial-in-confidence deals? My point is that we need whistleblower laws that allow for the public dissemination of matters of genuine public interest, not the wholesale leaking of anything a hacker can get their hands on.
https://t.co/PdUsw20zCB?TWJokvm
Not really – Cablegate was released by a disgruntled former employee.
The shameful Australian government has as much blood on its hands as Julian’s US and UK persecutors. Australians now know that, in instances that involve US special interest, it is futile to expect Australian consular assistance. Because US interest overrides Australian interest!