London's High Court has scheduled two days of hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday to decide whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can appeal a US extradition request to stand trial on spying charges. There is.
These charges carry penalties of up to 175 years in prison, but the real danger is that Mr. Assange could inadvertently be sentenced to death, said his wife, Stella.
“His health is deteriorating both physically and mentally,” Stella Assange recently told reporters. “His life is in danger every day he is in prison, and if he is extradited he will die.”
If Wednesday's ruling goes against Assange, his lawyers plan to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, but a favorable ruling there may not be enough to halt extradition.
Assange will not appear in court due to illness, his lawyer announced on Tuesday.
A British judge agreed in January 2021, ruling that he should not be extradited to the United States because he was likely to commit suicide in near-total isolation.
“I find that Mr. Assange's mental state makes it oppressive to extradite him to the United States,” Judge Vanessa Bariser said.
However, the United States continues to seek his extradition.
The 17 espionage charges filed by East Virginia District Court stem from Assange's 2010 publication of hundreds of thousands of pages of classified U.S. military documents on his WikiLeaks website. .
US prosecutors allege Assange conspired with US intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into Pentagon servers and recover documents.
These files, widely reported in Western media, revealed evidence of what many consider to be war crimes committed by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It includes footage of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters reporters.
“The world's most important press freedom case”
Since coming to prominence in 2010, WikiLeaks has become a repository of documentary evidence uncovered by government and corporate whistleblowers.
In 2013, National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents to WikiLeaks revealing that the NSA had installed digital stoves on the servers of email providers and secretly filtered private communications. did.
Three years later, millions of documents from Panamanian offshore law firm Mossack Fonseca have been leaked, leading to companies and public officials setting up offshore companies to hide funds that could be used for tax evasion or illegal purposes. It became clear that he had done so.
On X (formerly Twitter), Snowden called the Assange case “the most important press freedom case in the world,” and legal experts agree.
“This case is the first time that the U.S. government relied on the Espionage Act of 1917 as a basis for prosecuting a publisher,” Jameel Jaffer, a law and journalism professor at Columbia University, told Al Jazeera.
“A successful prosecution of Mr. Assange under this indictment would be critical to our democracy, including identifying sources, secretly communicating with and soliciting information from them, and protecting their identities from criminals.” A large part of vital investigative reporting will be criminalized,” Jaffer said. Disclosure and Publication of Confidential Information.
“I truly cannot imagine why the Biden administration would want to make this dangerous and short-sighted prosecution part of its legacy. The Department of Justice should have dropped the Espionage Act charges and they should never have been filed in the first place.”
The leak occurred in 2010, but Assange was not prosecuted by President Barack Obama's administration, which was in power at the time.
The charges come eight years after President Donald Trump's administration, and U.S. President Joe Biden appears to be doubling down on them.
Stella Assange argued that her husband was acting as a publisher, posting information of interest to the public, and that it was customary for publishers to not be prosecuted for carrying out their duties.
Stella Assange said: “Julian is charged with receiving, possessing, and communicating information to the public evidence of war crimes committed by the United States government.'' “Reporting a crime is never a crime.”
But U.S. prosecutors say he was more than just a recipient of the information.
“Assange agreed to assist Manning in cracking passwords stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers,” the indictment states. Cooperating with the hacking of Pentagon servers is a commissioned crime, which also puts U.S. intelligence sources at risk and “could be used to harm the United States,” prosecutors said.
“He has suffered enough.”
Assange's friends and family argue that in addition to protecting basic press freedoms, he should be freed from charges on humanitarian grounds.
Mr Assange has already spent seven years seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and has been held in London's high-security Belmarsh Prison since 2019.
Assange's supporters believe his 11 years in prison constitutes sufficient punishment.
WikiLeaks editor Kristin Hrafnsson called this “punishment through process.”
“It's clear that this is a deliberate attempt to wear him down in order to punish him for so long,” Hrafnsson told reporters recently.
Julian and Stella Assange have two sons, conceived while in the Ecuadorian embassy, but have only met their fathers in prison.
The Australian government, where Assange is from, has also called for an early end to the grueling legal process.
On February 14, Parliament in Canberra upheld that the 2010 information leaks about Mr Assange “revealed shocking evidence of misconduct by the United States” and said: “The United Kingdom and the United States should ensure Mr. Assange's return. passed a resolution emphasizing the importance of ending the issue. My family lives in Australia. ”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the resolution had the support of a wide range of political forces “who will have a wide range of views on the rights and wrongs of Julian Assange's actions”.
Still, he said, “They came to a common view that enough was enough and it was time to put an end to this.”
Donald Rothwell, a professor of international law at the Australian National University, told Al Jazeera that Australia “has sought to advance its position by making appropriate diplomatic representations”. “But the ability to take it forward is limited by the fact that legally and politically the issue really lies with the UK and the US.”
The U.S. is also pursuing Snowden under the Espionage Act of 1917, but “he is effectively shielded from U.S. prosecution because he is currently a Russian citizen and lives in Russia, and Russia will not extradite him.” '' Rothwell said.
