On Monday morning the UK’s High Court in London granted permission to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, to appeal his extradition to the United States. But Assange supporters should be cautious before dancing in the streets. Since this case is a political charade designed to silence Assange by keeping him in legal limbo, Monday’s verdict may be little more than salt in the wounds of his jailers.
Still, it is a significant development.
Very slowly, the tide seems to be turning. And Joe Biden is getting nervous. The New York Times reported last month that the American president claimed to be considering the request of Australian leaders who have asked the United States to end its legal case against Assange, an Australian citizen.
In 2010 Assange published through his WikiLeaks platform revelations of American war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, followed six years later by evidence of corruption within the Democratic National Committee.
Assange, 52, faces one charge of computer misuse and seventeen charges of espionage under America’s infamous 1917 Espionage Act. After the verdict was announced in London, Simon Crowther, the Legal Adviser at Amnesty International, said, “The High Court’s decision is a rare piece of positive news for Julian Assange” and that Biden’s “ongoing attempt to prosecute Assange puts media freedom at risk worldwide.”
At issue during Monday’s proceedings were assurances provided to the court by the United States at a previous hearing. The Assange defense accepted those assurances that their client would not be subjected to the death penalty. However, they challenged American lawyers on the claim that Assange would receive the same First Amendment protections as a US citizen at his trial in the Eastern District of Virginia, where former author and former intelligence author says a “fair trial” is “impossible.” The Guardian reported that Assange lawyers described the problems with the American case as “multifold”, while the Associated Press described the lawyers arguing that First Amendment assurances “blatantly inadequate.”
Stella Assange, the publisher’s wife and a lawyer herself, argued after the verdict that American lawyers had put “lipstick on a pig, but the judges did not buy it.”
The case is now widely viewed as one of the most important press freedom cases of the twenty-first century by news outlets such as Jacobin.
Caitlin Vogus, the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s deputy director of advocacy, asserted her organization’s support for Assange and told Truthout, an independent nonprofit news organization, “The Biden administration can and should end this case now.”
Rebecca Vincent, from Reporters Without Borders, expressed cautious optimism. “Relief is mostly what I feel,” she told WikiLeaks, “But actually we’ve all been working so hard for this and I hope the court is starting to see it in the right way—that we can actually have a legal means for preventing extradition instead of a continued political battle because, of course, this is a political case.”
If the Assange case continues to be a political football this fall, the results could be disastrous for President Biden, who is losing voters to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. If elected, Kennedy has promised to pardon Assange on day one.
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