Tag: Julian Assange

Would Julian Assange’s extradition threaten press freedoms worldwide? | Julian Assange

Whistleblower lawyer on Assange extradition: ‘It would affect publishers, journalists, bloggers, anyone – me and you.’

As the world commemorates Press Freedom Day, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange remains detained in a high-security prison in the United Kingdom while the United States fights for his extradition.

Assange faces 17 Espionage Act charges and a charge of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for publishing about 400,000 classified US military documents exposing potential US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So what would Assange’s prosecution mean for press freedom?

This week on UpFront, Marc Lamont Hill talks to lawyer and director of the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program at ExposeFacts, Jesselyn Radack.

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Mexico to Iran, why are attacks on embassies so controversial? | Politics News

EXPLAINER

International law decrees that embassies are ‘inviolable’. Recent attacks on embassies have breached that understanding, prompting anger.

Mexico and Ecuador are locked in a diplomatic spat after Ecuadorian police raided the Mexican embassy in Quito on Friday to arrest former Ecuadorian Vice President Jorge Glas.

Glas had been seeking political asylum in the Mexican embassy since December and was convicted twice of corruption.

But the Ecuadorian police assault on the Mexican embassy was not the only attack on a diplomatic mission in recent days. On April 1, Iran’s consulate in the Syrian capital, Damascus, was destroyed in a suspected Israeli missile attack. Several Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) military advisers were present at the consulate when the attack took place, and seven were killed according to an IRGC statement.

These incidents have sparked a wave of condemnation that has gone beyond traditional allies of Mexico and Iran. So why is it that attacks on diplomatic missions are such a big deal, and how have Mexico and Iran reacted?

How have Mexico and Iran responded?

Following the attack on the embassy in Quito, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador wrote in an X post that the incident constituted an “authoritarian act” and “a flagrant violation of international law and sovereignty of Mexico”.

Foreign Minister Alicia Barcena said on X that Mexican diplomatic personnel would immediately leave Ecuador. On Monday, Mexico said it planned to take the case against Ecuador to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Iran, meanwhile, has pledged a response to the attack on its mission in Damascus and is weighing its options.

In a statement, Nasser Kanani, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Iran “reserves the right to carry out a reaction and will decide on the type of response and the punishment of the aggressor”.

Hossein Akbari, the Iranian ambassador to Syria, said Tehran’s response would be “decisive”.

The options before Iran range from overt action against Israel such as unclaimed drone strikes to attacks on Israeli diplomatic facilities. After the Damascus incident, Israel temporarily shuttered 28 embassies globally as a precautionary measure.

Why are attacks on embassies such a big deal?

The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations is an international treaty signed in 1963, governing consular relations between sovereign states. It was signed following a UN Conference on Consular Relations.

The Vienna Convention decrees that embassies are inviolable and local law enforcement agencies of host countries are not allowed to enter the premises. They can enter only with the consent of the head of the mission.

Under international law, embassies of countries are treated as their sovereign territories — not those of the country hosting them.

Diplomats also have diplomatic or consular immunity, which means they can be exempt from some of the laws of the host country and are protected from arrest or detention.

However, they can be declared persona non grata by the host country, which means the host country is allowed to send a foreign consular staff member back to the home country.

In effect, this means that the bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus was — under international law — at par with an attack on Iranian soil. The Ecuadorian police action in Quito, likewise, was tantamount to its officers entering Mexico to arrest someone without the Mexican government’s approval.

Times when embassies or consulates have sheltered dissidents

The decision by Mexico to offer refuge to Glas follows a centuries-old tradition when many embassies have sheltered dissidents or political asylum seekers who fear arrest, violence or even death in their own countries. Here are some prominent instances from recent decades.

  • In late March, the office of Argentina’s President Javier Milei announced that members of Venezuela’s opposition coalition had sought refuge in the Argentinian embassy in Caracas.
  • WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was born in Australia, found asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy in London between 2012 and 2019 amid a legal battle with British and US authorities. He entered the embassy after a London court ordered Assange to be extradited to Sweden over rape allegations and his appeal was rejected. Ecuador revoked his asylum in 2019.
  • Former Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed sought shelter at the Indian High Commission in Male amid reports of threats to his life after a court issued an arrest warrant. He finally left after India brokered a deal for his freedom.
  • Chinese civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng fled from house arrest in 2012 and sought asylum at the United States embassy in Beijing.
  • Former Afghan President Mohammad Najibullah sought shelter at the compound of the United Nations Special Mission to Afghanistan after he was removed by armed groups in 1992. When the Taliban took over Kabul, they killed Najibullah in 1996 while he was still sheltering.
  • Erich Honecker, the former leader of East Germany was indicted in Germany for the deaths of East Germans who tried to cross the Berlin Wall. In 1991, he sought refuge in the Chilean embassy in Moscow.

Times when embassies or consulates have been attacked

Despite protections under international law, diplomatic missions have often come under attack — though usually not from host governments directly. Here are some instances from recent decades.

  • In September 2023, an assailant attacked the Cuban embassy in the US capital of Washington, DC with two Molotov cocktails, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla announced on social media.
  • In July 2023, protesters stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad over what was supposed to be the second burning of a Quran in front of the Iraqi embassy in Stockholm. Shortly after this, Iraq expelled Sweden’s ambassador.
  • In September 2022, a suicide bombing took place near the entrance of the Russian embassy in Kabul. Two of the six casualties were employees of the embassy.
  • In July 2021, the Cuban embassy in Paris was attacked with petrol bombs, causing serious damage but no injuries.
  • In 2012, the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya was attacked, killing the US ambassador and three others.
  • A suicide car bombing at the Indian embassy in Kabul killed 58 people in July 2008, injuring more than 140 others.
  • On August 7, 1998, the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam were attacked in truck bombings that killed more than 220 people.

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UK court opens way for Assange to appeal US extradition | Julian Assange News

High Court gives the US additional time to give ‘satisfactory assurances’ that WikiLeaks founder will face a fair trial.

A UK court has ruled that Julian Assange should have the chance to appeal an order to extradite him to the US.

The High Court in London ruled on Tuesday that the WikiLeaks founder must have the right to challenge the British government’s June 2022 extradition order, unless the United States provides within three weeks assurances that he would receive a fair trial and would not face the death penalty.

At the same time, the court rejected Assange’s bid for an appeal based on the claim that the case against him is politically motivated.

The ruling suggests that the legal wrangling, which has been ongoing for more than a decade, will continue. Assange, who was not present in court to hear the ruling, has been detained in London’s Belmarsh Prison since he was arrested in 2019.

US prosecutors are seeking to put the 52-year-old on trial on 18 counts, all bar one under the Espionage Act, over WikiLeaks’s release of confidential US military records and diplomatic cables.

Assange’s lawyers in February sought permission to challenge the United Kingdom’s approval of his extradition to the US, arguing his prosecution was politically motivated.

In their ruling, two senior judges said the Australian citizen had a real prospect of successfully appealing against extradition on a number of grounds.

The court said in its written ruling that as a non-US national, Assange arguably would not be able to rely on the First Amendment right of free speech, and could later be charged with a capital offence. That, it said, could mean it would be unlawful to extradite him.

Judges Victoria Sharp and Jeremy Johnson gave Washington three weeks to provide fresh assurances over concerns that he could be “prejudiced at trial” because he is not a US citizen and that he could face the death penalty if convicted.

If those assurances are not forthcoming, then Assange will be granted permission to appeal, the ruling said.

A further hearing has been scheduled for May 20, meaning that Assange cannot be extradited immediately. His campaign team had warned that could have happened, depending on the ruling.

‘Highly nuanced’

Though offering Assange the possible chance to appeal, the court rejected the WikiLeaks founder’s appeal bid on the basis that the case was politically motivated or that he would not receive a fair trial.

Al Jazeera’s Jonah Hull, reporting from London, suggested: “It was a highly nuanced decision in the end.

“The judges haven’t thrown out the grounds for an appeal hearing, they have essentially upheld them. They basically said, ‘Yes, we understand that there is a basis here for an appeal – however, we are going to defer a decision on that until May 20’, when they called for a second hearing,” Hull said.

WikiLeaks published an extract from the ruling that lists the “satisfactory assurances” the US must provide for Assange’s extradition to be granted.

“The court has given US Gov 3 weeks to give satisfactory assurances: That Mr. Assange is permitted to rely on the First Amendment to the US constitution; not prejudiced at trial by reason of his nationality; and that the death penalty is not imposed,” it wrote.

The US argues that WikiLeaks’s revelations imperilled the lives of agents and that there is no excuse for Assange’s criminality.

The Australian’s supporters hail him as an anti-establishment hero who is being persecuted for exposing US war crimes.

The US has retorted that the charges are for “indiscriminately and knowingly” publishing sources’ names and not his political opinions.

Should Assange eventually lose this latest appeal bid, he will have exhausted all UK appeals and would be set to enter the extradition process.

However, his team has previously indicated they will ask the European courts to intervene.



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The trials of Julian Assange: A death sentence for democracy | Julian Assange

In June 2022, when Russia’s foreign ministry announced that it was considering “stringent measures” against United States media outlets in response to US restrictions on Russian media, the US Department of State huffily complained that the Kremlin was “engaged in a full assault on media freedom, access to information, and the truth”.

This sort of hypocrisy was nothing new; after all, the world’s self-appointed greatest democracy has long made it clear that basic rights and freedoms are things that only its enemies must abide by. The shameless double standard enables the US to do stuff like make a ruckus over Cuba’s political prisoners while simultaneously operating an illegal US prison on occupied Cuban territory – or call out China for an alleged “spy balloon” while simultaneously spying on China and everyone else on the planet.

And on Wednesday, February 21, as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange completed one last legal attempt to avoid extradition to the US, the country’s own “full assault on media freedom, access to information, and the truth” was once again on full display.

If extradited, the Australian-born Assange faces up to 175 years in prison on spying charges – which again is pretty rich coming from a nation with an extensive history of illegally spying on its own citizens. In reality, Assange’s only “crime” was to utilise WikiLeaks to expose the truth of US military crimes, as in the notorious “Collateral Murder” video that was released in 2010.

The video footage, which dates from 2007, shows a massacre of a dozen people in Baghdad by upbeat helicopter-borne US military personnel, who did not find it necessary to conceal the extent to which they were getting off on the slaughter.

Among the murdered Iraqis were two staffers for the Reuters news agency. Talk about assaults on media freedom.

The US insists that, by publishing such content, Assange actively endangered the lives of innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond. But as I have pointed out before, it would seem that one surefire way to not endanger innocent lives in such places would be to refrain from blowing them up in the first place.

To be sure, it is common knowledge that the US has killed a whole lot of civilians in a whole lot of countries, although the official narrative still maintains that all killing is ultimately done in the name of freedom, democracy, and other noble goals – rather than for sport or fun, as might be suggested by the “Collateral Murder” production.

So why, then, the need for such over-the-top pretences to secrecy and the super-vilification of the person of Julian Assange?

In the end, the US can’t afford to have its global do-gooder disguise too relentlessly or thoroughly challenged – since too much “access to information and the truth” would relieve the nation of its alibi for wreaking havoc across the world. Regardless of the final outcome, the protracted US war on Assange has already set a chilling precedent in terms of press freedom and other essential liberties.

Indeed, the calculated physical and mental destruction of Assange is meant to deter other publishers and journalists from the crime of pursuing the truth, as the US has effectively undertaken to classify reality itself. To that end, pending his extradition to the US, Assange has been held for the past five years in Belmarsh prison in southeast London, where the British government has proved faithfully complicit in the protracted efforts to bring about his demise.

Shortly after Assange’s arrest and incarceration in 2019, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer warned that the man’s life was at risk, and that he exhibited “all the symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture”.

Melzer, who is now a professor of international law at the University of Glasgow, also remarked at the time that, “while the US Government prosecutes Mr. Assange for publishing information about serious human rights violations, including torture and murder, the officials responsible for these crimes continue to enjoy impunity.”

Maybe Melzer should have been jailed, too?

And as Assange’s extradition battle now comes to a close, it seems the US may at long last get to definitively kill the messenger – and not just metaphorically. As his wife Stella Assange recently told reporters, “If he’s extradited, he will die.”

But Julian Assange’s persecution and torment also constitute a death sentence for any approximation of democracy and justice in the United States of America, a country whose constitution supposedly enshrines freedom of speech and the press.

At any rate, injustice has already scored a major victory with the chronic underreporting in US corporate media of Assange’s trials, which National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has described as “the most important press freedom case in the world”.

In other words, this should be major news for the news industry itself. But disappearing the truth is another way to kill it – and in that respect, Julian Assange is already dead.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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Who is Julian Assange and why does the United States want him so badly? | Julian Assange

NewsFeed

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been fighting for years against being sent to the United States – where he could be jailed for life if convicted on spying charges. Virginia Pietromarchi explains who the whistleblower is and why he’s wanted in the US.

Published On 20 Feb 2024

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Who is Julian Assange? Will the WikiLeaks founder be extradited to the US? | Julian Assange News

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is making a last-ditch attempt to prevent his extradition to the United States to face criminal charges over espionage and the publication of classified information.

WikiLeaks caused a diplomatic storm after it published a huge cache of secret military files in 2010 and 2011. Washington wants to try him for the leaks that it says damaged its national security.

Here is what we know about Assange and his legal battle:

What is the trial about?

Two senior judges will hear arguments from Assange’s legal team over two days starting on Tuesday.

A UK High Court in 2021 ordered Assange’s extradition, which was upheld by the Supreme Court a year later. Former home secretary Priti Patel cleared Assange’s extradition order in April 2022.

The Australian-born Assange, who has been in prison since 2019, wants a review of former home secretary’s extradition order and to challenge the 2021 court order in the two-day hearing.

What is WikiLeaks?

In 2006, Assange launched WikiLeaks, an online platform where people can anonymously submit classified leaks such as documents and videos.

In April 2010, WikiLeaks released footage showing a US Apache helicopter attack which killed a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists, in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. This caused the platform to gain prominence.

Also in 2010, it released more than 90,000 classified US military documents on the Afghanistan war, and almost 400,000 secret US files on the Iraq war. The leaks represented the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history.

WikiLeaks also released 250,000 secret diplomatic cables from US embassies around the world, with some of the information published by newspapers such as The New York Times and Britain’s The Guardian.

US politicians and military officials, angered by the leaks, argued the unauthorised publication of information put lives at risk.

In 2013, Chelsea Manning, a former army intelligence analyst, was sentenced for leaking thousands of secret messages to WikiLeaks. She served seven years in a military prison before being released on an order of President Barack Obama.

What is Assange charged with?

Assange has been indicted in the US on 18 charges over the publication of hundreds of thousands of classified documents in 2010 by WikiLeaks. Seventeen of these counts are for espionage while one is for computer misuse.

US lawyers say Assange is guilty of conspiring with Manning and attempting to hack into a Pentagon computer.

The prosecution against Assange is made under the 1917 Espionage Act, which has never before been used for publishing classified information.

Supporters of Assange argue he should be protected under the press freedoms granted by the First Amendment to the US Constitution and he had acted as a journalist to expose US military wrongdoing. Amnesty has released a statement appealing to the US authorities to drop the charges, deeming the government’s pursuit of Assange a “full-scale assault on the right to freedom of expression”.

“Julian has been indicted for receiving, possessing and communicating information to the public of evidence of war crimes committed by the US government,” Assange’s wife Stella said. “Reporting a crime is never a crime.”

Who is Julian Assange?

Assange, now 52, was born Townsville, Australia, in July 1971.

Assange is married to Stella Assange, a lawyer who met him in 2011 when she was hired as part of his legal team.

Stella, originally called Sara Gonzalez Devant, changed her name to Stella Moris in 2012 to protect herself and her family while working with Assange.

“His life is at risk every single day he stays in prison, and if he’s extradited, he will die,” Stella has said.

Assange’s wife has been very vocal in defence of her husband. The couple has two children and married in March 2022.

While the US only officially unsealed criminal charges against Assange in 2019, his legal battle spans 13 years.

On November 18, 2010, a Swedish court ordered Assange’s arrest over rape allegations made by two female Swedish WikiLeaks volunteers. Assange denied the allegations and claimed the Swedish case was a pretext to extradite him, or hand him over, to the US to face charges over the WikiLeaks releases.

In December 2010, Assange was arrested in the UK on a European Arrest Warrant but was released on bail.

London’s Westminster Magistrates Court in 2011 ordered Assange to be extradited to Sweden, a decision he appealed. In 2012, his final appeal was rejected by the UK Supreme Court, after which he sought asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.

The asylum was granted, but revoked in April 2019, after which a screaming Assange was carried out of the embassy. Throughout his asylum, UK police patrolled the embassy, saying Assange would be arrested if he left the building over his failure to surrender to bail earlier. His two children were born while he was holed up inside the embassy.

In June 2019, the US Department of Justice formally asked UK authorities to hand Assange over to the US, where he would face charges. Swedish authorities dropped the rape investigation against Assange in 2019, saying the evidence was not strong enough to bring charges, partly due to the passage of time.

The extradition hearings began in February 2020, but were adjourned after a week. In January 2021, in London, Judge Vanessa Baraitser concluded that Assange should not be sent to the US due to his frail mental health, adding there was a risk he would attempt suicide.

Besides his mental health, Assange’s physical health has also declined in prison. In October 2021, he experienced a mini-stroke. He also broke a rib coughing. His wife has said he has aged prematurely.

However, the US authorities won an appeal in December 2021 at London’s High Court against this decision, after giving a package of assurances about the conditions of Assange’s detention if convicted, including a pledge he could be transferred to Australia to serve any sentence.

What are the possible outcomes of the hearing?

If Assange and his legal team succeed, his case will be moved to a full appeal.

If he fails, his team would appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) where he already has an application lodged and which could stop his extradition. However, they fear that Assange would be extradited before the European Court picks up the case.

Assange’s team plans to argue that he can not get a fair trial in the US, that a treaty between the US and UK prohibits extradition for political offences and that the crime of espionage was not meant to apply to publishers.

If Assange is extradited, his supporters say he could be held in a US high security jail and if convicted could face a 175-year prison sentence. US prosecutors have said the sentence would not be longer than 63 months.

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