On Friday, British Home Secretary Priti Patel agreed to extradite Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the United States. There he will be brought to justice for, among other things, espionage and risks up to 175 years in prison.
Assange’s lawyers say they will appeal the extradition decision – but the legal toolbox is starting to echo even now. In a few weeks or months, the now 50-year-old Assange can be on a flight to the United States.
The tours in the case have been so many that it is easy to stop reading here, I know. But the case of Julian Assange affects us all.
This is bigger than Julian Assange, according to organizations such as Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders. Bigger than his ego.
The rivals and the messy private life can have opinions about – including what emerged in the preliminary investigation into suspected sexual crimes in Sweden in 2010. But that preliminary investigation was closed in 2019.
Now it’s about if anything else.
Now it’s about the right to publish leaked source material that shows irregularities and serious crimes committed by governments and their henchmen.
US authorities claim that Assange is an activist who deliberately endangered US personnel. There are suspicions that he collaborated with the Russian intelligence service in the leak of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail in 2016. But so far no evidence has been published that Julian Assange deliberately acted on behalf of Russia or any other hostile foreign power.
From what we know, he is a talented Australian individualist driven by ideals of transparency, freedom of information and a peculiar blend of libertarianism and anarchism. He was only 16 when he became a hacker under the pseudonym Mendax, and formed a hacker group with two others: “International Subversives”.
Four years later, he was arrested for hacking into the terminals of a Canadian telecommunications company, and received a relatively mild punishment.
He was 22 years old when he helped Australian police catch pedophiles online. Then the internet had just broken through.
When he was 35, he founded Wikileaks, an organization that published leaked original documents on its site.
As a 38-year-old editor-in-chief for the site, he published “Collateral Murder” – a leaked film of how an American army helicopter shelled civilians in Baghdad on July 12, 2007. The film had a huge impact, as did the upcoming and highly controversial publications of classified US documents on military operations and prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan . In 2010 and 2011, hundreds of thousands of leaked American diplomatic shipments were also published.
He was 47 years old when he was kicked out of the Ecuadorian embassy where he had previously been granted asylum, and was arrested by British police for breach of bail. Shortly afterwards, the United States requested that he be extradited for espionage.
Intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning was the source of much of the publication on Iraq and Afghanistan. But the Americans believe that Julian Assange actively helped Manning access the information and persuaded him to hand it over. Therefore, they also want to prosecute him for espionage.
This despite the fact that Manning at the trial said he had acted of his own conviction.
This leads to uncomfortable questions about freedom of the press. Would a Swedish newspaper today dare to publish a film like “Collateral Murder”? Hopefully the answer is yes. But organizations such as Amnesty International believe that the British decision to extradite Assange to the United States sends an “icy warning” to all journalists around the world.
US authorities do not see Wikileaks as journalism. But where does the border go?
It is right to criticize several of the publication decisions, especially in cases where individuals have been named and put in danger. But it is still unclear if anyone was actually injured as a result of the publications.
Julian Assange is stated at the same time feel worse. He is today married to the lawyer Stella Assange, with whom he has two children. It is not easy to understand why he is in prison – the sentence he was sentenced for breaking the bail has been served. His mental health has deteriorated, according to a series of reports, and a judge temporarily stopped extradition due to the risk of suicide.
The United States has promised good conditions in prison and a fair trial. Amnesty International and a number of other human rights organizations do not believe those promises are to be trusted. And the question is whether there should be a trial at all.