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rebecca vincent
Supporters Rally Behind Assange as UK Court Hears 'Pathetic' US Case
"Let me be very clear: This case is about journalism," said a campaigner with Reporters Without Borders. "It is about press freedom. If they make an exception of Julian Assange, the rule will be broken."
Feb 21, 2024
Supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange marched the streets of central London on Wednesday demanding his immediate release after U.S. government lawyers argued to the British High Court that the journalist should be extradited across the Atlantic to face espionage charges.
"How pathetic the U.S. case is," Stella Assange, the WikiLeaks founder's wife, told a crowd gathered outside Wednesday's court hearing, which represents the final legal avenue in the United Kingdom to prevent his extradition to the U.S.
"What they're trying argue is that state secrets trump revealing state crimes," Stella Assange said of U.S. lawyers. "This is the balance they're trying to shift. They want impunity, they don't want to be scrutinized, and journalism stands in the way."
BREAKING: @Stella_Assange explains the arguments laid out by the prosecution#FreeAssangeNOW pic.twitter.com/60M286NkMb
— Free Assange - #FreeAssange (@FreeAssangeNews) February 21, 2024
A decision in the case—which will decide whether Julian Assange can appeal his extradition—could be weeks, or even months, away.
If the British High Court rules that Assange can't appeal, his legal team is expected to ask the European Court of Human Rights to halt his extradition to the U.S., where Assange faces 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and a possible 175-year prison sentence.
United Nations experts, international human rights groups, and even one British judge have argued that extradition to the U.S. would put the 52-year-old publisher's life at grave risk. Assange was unable to attend this week's hearings or even follow them virtually due to his poor health, his lawyers said.
But global calls from
press freedom groups, the government of Assange's home country, and others for the U.S. Justice Department to drop the case and let the publisher go free have not moved the Biden administration, which decided to continue pursuing Assange's extradition after inheriting the case from the Trump administration—whose CIA reportedly considered kidnapping or assassinating the WikiLeaks founder.
During Wednesday's hearing, the U.S. government's lawyers
argued that Assange's decision to seek out and publish classified U.S. documents—some of which exposed American war crimes—went "far beyond" what could be characterized as journalistic conduct, an argument that many journalists have rejected.
"It is impossible to overstate the dangerous precedent Mr. Assange's indictment under the Espionage Act and possible extradition sets: Every national security journalist who reports on classified information now faces possible Espionage Act charges," Laura Poitras, a journalist and documentary filmmaker, wrote in a New York Timesop-ed in 2020. "It paves the way for the United States government to indict other international journalists and publishers. And it normalizes other countries' prosecution of journalists from the United States as spies."
Assange's lawyer, Edward Fitzgerald, similarly argued during the first day of the closely watched hearings on Tuesday that Assange is "being prosecuted for engaging in [the] ordinary journalistic practice of obtaining and publishing classified information, information that is both true and of obvious and important public interest."
Thousands marched through the streets to the office of the UK Prime Minister in Downing Street following the conclusion of Julian Assange's court hearing today, calling for his immediate release | via @MintPressNews #FreeAssange #FreeAssangeNOW pic.twitter.com/YIpjdoT65j
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) February 21, 2024
Rebecca Vincent, director of campaigns at Reporters Without Borders, said following Wednesday's hearing that "in these past two days, we have heard nothing new from the U.S. government."
"We have heard them double down on the same arguments that they've been making for 13 years," said Vincent. "Let me be very clear: This case is about journalism. It is about press freedom. If they make an exception of Julian Assange, the rule will be broken—and no one, no journalist, no publisher, no journalistic source, no media organization can ever be confident that their rights will be respected again."
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DC Belmarsh Tribunal Urges Biden to Drop Assange Charges
"How is it acceptable that perpetrators of the illegal invasion of Iraq are the ones who get to decide if the man who exposed their crimes is a journalist?" asked Abby Martin.
Dec 11, 2023
Seeking to pressure the Biden administration into dropping charges against jailed Australian WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, human rights and press freedom defenders gathered in Washington, D.C. over the weekend for the second U.S. session of the Belmarsh Tribunal.
The tribunal—organized by Progressive International in partnership with the Wau Holland Foundation—was held Saturday at the National Press Club, where Assange first premiered "Collateral Murder," a video showing a U.S. Army helicopter crew killing a group of Iraqi civilians and then laughing about it.
"As long as the Espionage Act is deployed to imprison those who expose war crimes, no publisher and no journalist will be safe. It is time to free the truth."
The Belmarsh Tribunal was first convened in London in 2021. The event is inspired by the Russell Tribunal, a 1966 event organized by philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre to hold the U.S. accountable for its escalating war crimes in Vietnam.
Saturday's gathering was co-hosted by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and The Intercept D.C. bureau chief Ryan Grim.
"Believe it or not, there are only two persons in the world who have been punished for the war crimes that were revealed by WikiLeaks: Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange," Grim told attendees.
Srećko Horvat, the Croatian author, philosopher, and activist who co-founded the Belmarsh Tribunal,
said that "the pressure is mounting on the Biden administration to free Julian Assange."
"More than one man's life is at stake, but the First Amendment and freedom of the press itself," he added. "As long as the Espionage Act is deployed to imprison those who expose war crimes, no publisher and no journalist will be safe. It is time to free the truth."
Rebecca Vincent, director of campaigns at Reporters Without Borders, warned that "if the U.S. government succeeds to extradite Julian Assange to this country, he will become the first publisher imprisoned under the Espionage Act—but he will not be the last."
According to Progressive International:
U.S. congresspeople from both parties are lobbying U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and President Joe Biden to stop pursuing Assange under the Espionage Act. At the same time, Australian members of Parliament are making a major bipartisan push to demand the U.S. Justice Department end its legal campaign against Australian national Assange.
Assange—who suffers from physical and mental health problems including heart and respiratory issues—published classified materials, many of them provided by Manning, exposing U.S. and allied nations' war crimes, including the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and "Collateral Murder."
Since Assange's apprehension 13 years ago in London, he has been confined for seven years in the Ecuadorean Embassy while he was protected by the administration of former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, and jailed in the U.K. capital's maximum-security Belmarsh Prison. He's currently being held on remand in the notorious lockup pending extradition to the United States after the U.K. High Court rejected his final appeal earlier this year.
If fully convicted, Assange—who is 52 years old and is married with two children—could be sentenced to up to 175 years behind bars.
"How is it acceptable that perpetrators of the illegal invasion of Iraq are the ones who get to decide if the man who exposed their crimes is a journalist?" asked American journalist Abby Martin during the event.
Pivoting to Israel's current war on Gaza—which many experts and observers around the world are calling a genocide as over 70,000 Palestinians have been killed, maimed, or left missing and 80% of the strip's population has been forcibly displaced—Martin asserted that "the people of Gaza have risked and lost their lives to expose the war crimes of the U.S. and Israel."
"The people of Iraq did not have that chance," she added. "They had WikiLeaks."
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