SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) --
“To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
(Calgacus, as quoted by Tacitus, Agricola 30-31)"
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange | Photo by Cancillería Ecuador
Attorneys
for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange plan to appeal to the Supreme
Court in the United Kingdom after the country’s appeals court overturned
a decision that blocked the extradition of Assange to the United
States.
The High Court of Justice was “satisfied” with diplomatic
assurances offered by the U.S. government related to how Assange would
be treated in jail or prison, and they stated, “There is no reason why
this court should not accept the assurances as meaning what they say.”
“There is no basis for assuming that the U.S.A. has not given the assurances in good faith,” the High Court also insisted.
More
significantly, the High Court remitted the case back to the district
court and instructed a district judge at this level to send the request
to the Secretary of State in the Home Department for extradition. The
Home Department previously allowed the extradition request to be considered by a district court.
The
High Court decision came on Human Rights Day, a day marked by countries
in the United Nations, and the decision was immediately condemned by
press freedom and human rights groups, and various other civil society
organizations throughout the world.
Assange is detained at Her
Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh in London, a high-security prison where he has
been held since he was expelled from the Ecuador Embassy on April 11,
2019. He faces 18 charges—17 of which are charges under the Espionage
Act.
The Espionage Act is a U.S. law passed in 1917 that the
Justice Department has increasingly wielded against media sources who
share “classified” documents or talk about sensitive information with
journalists.
Assange’s attorneys at Birnberg Peirce indicated
their “appeal to the Supreme Court would relate to the question of the
assurances. Appeals on other important questions, including questions of
free speech and on the political motivation of the U.S. extradition
request, have yet to be considered by an appeal court.” (They will
likely be considered after an appeal of this decision.)
"This decision marks a disastrous turning point for journalists and journalism around the world," declared
Rebecca Vincent, the Reporters Without Borders director of
international campaigns. “It falls on the very day when we should
celebrate the presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize to two journalists
and urge states to respect their commitments to press freedom, which
they have just reaffirmed at the Summit for Democracy organized by
United States.”
“We call on the U.S. government to truly lead by
example and to close this case now, before it does any more damage.
Julian Assange should be released immediately and steps should be taken
so that no other journalist, editor, or source can be targeted in this
way.”
“This is a travesty of justice. By allowing this appeal, the
High Court has chosen to accept the deeply flawed diplomatic assurances
given by the U.S. that Assange would not be held in solitary
confinement in a maximum security prison,” said
Amnesty International’s Europe director Nils Muižnieks. “The fact that
the U.S. has reserved the right to change its mind at any time means
that these assurances are not worth the paper they are written on.”
Stella Moris, who is Assange’s fiancé, called
the ruling a “grave miscarriage of justice.” Outside the courthouse,
she reacted, "Today is international Human Rights Day. What a shame. How
cynical to have this decision on this day, to have the foremost
publisher [and] journalist of the past 50 years in a U.K prison accused
of publishing the truth about war crimes, about C.I.A. kill teams."
"In
fact," Moris continued, "every time we have a hearing, we know more
about the abusive nature, the criminal nature of this case."
The U.S. government offered diplomatic assurances after Judge Vanessa Baraitser denied the extradition request on January 4.
According
to the assurances put forward, the U.S. government would not impose
special administrative measures (SAMs) on Assange before trial or after
he was convicted. However, it contained a major loophole. If Assange
committed a “future act” that “met the test” for SAMs, the U.S. would
designate him for such restrictive confinement conditions. They did not
specify what type of acts might justify abandoning this assurance.
The
U.S. government pledged that Assange would not be designated for ADX
Florence, a supermax prison in Colorado. Yet similar to the assurance to
not impose SAMs, they indicated if Assange commits a “future act” that
meets the "test for such designation” he could still be confined in a
maximum security prison.
Prosecutors pledged to allow Assange to
apply for a prisoner transfer to Australia to serve his U.S. sentence
under the Council of Europe Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced
Persons.
If Assange was extradited and held in a U.S. jail or
prison, the U.S. pledged to ensure he received “clinical and
psychological treatment” as recommended by a “qualified treating
clinician employed or retained” by the facility where he is held. But if
a facility lacked resources or the psychologist of staff did not conclude that Assange needed a higher level of care, he might not receive treatment.
“The
first and fourth assurances wholly exclude the possibility of Mr.
Assange being made subject to SAMs, or detained at the ADX, either
pretrial or after conviction, unless, after entry of the assurances, he
commits any future act which renders him liable to such conditions of
detention,” according to the High Court decision. “It is difficult to
see why extradition should be refused on the basis that Mr Assange might
in future act in a way which exposes him to conditions he is anxious to
avoid.”
Such a statement by the High Court accepts there are no
political motives behind the extradition, and none of the U.S. officials
involved in the prosecution intend to inflict harm on Assange.
The
High Court determined the U.S. has “made its decision as to how it will
respond to any request” for a prisoner transfer to Australia if Assange
is convicted. They gave “as explicit an assurance as it can.”
“The
reality is that this court is being invited to reject the U.S.A.’s
assurances either on the basis that they are not offered in good faith
or that they are for some other reason not capable of being accepted at
face value,” according to the High Court. “That is a serious
allegation,” especially since “the United Kingdom and the U.S.A. have a
long history of cooperation in extradition matters, and the U.S.A. has
in the past frequently provided and invariably fulfilled assurances.”
But journalist Richard Medhurst obtained
documents related to the 2009 extradition of David Mendoza Herrarte
from Spain to the U.S. Diplomatic assurances were given by the U.S.
government to Spain, but the U.S. violated those assurances.
Mendoza
was accused of drug trafficking. As the Assange legal team recounted in
a filing submitted to the High Court, “The Spanish Court made Mendoza’s
extradition conditional on prisoner transfer back to Spain to serve any
sentence. In response, the U.S. provided the same assurance offered
here to the Spanish Court.”
“Upon surrender, the prosecution did,
as promised, consent to the application. It was then, however, refused
by the [Justice Department]. When the Spanish court complained of the
‘clear breach’ of the assurance, the U.S.A. retorted that ‘the U.S. did
not make and therefore could not and did not renege on a promise
guaranteeing that Mendoza would comply with the sentence imposed in
Spain.”
“The promise that was made at the time,” U.S. authorities
claimed, was that Mendoza could apply for protection under the Treaty of
the Council of Europe to serve his sentence in Spain.
Similarly,
all the U.S. government is saying at this stage is that they will
consent to an application from Assange for prisoner transfer, which is
relatively meaningless, and they are not saying they would grant the
application.
Amnesty International previously stated
the so-called “assurances” upon which the U.S. government relies “leave
Mr. Assange at risk of ill-treatment,” are “inherently unreliable,” and
“should be rejected,” adding that they are “discredited by their
admission that they reserved the right to reverse those guarantees.”
Though
it did not persuade the court to uphold the district judge’s decision,
the High Court concluded Baraitser did not make an error when she
applied a test and determined extradition would be oppressive for health
reasons.
“We bear in mind that the judge had to take into account
the evidence of a witness called by Mr Assange, who considered the
[Alexandria Detention Center] to be a very well-run jail, accepted that
there had been no successful suicides at the ADC since its last
inspection in 2017, and considered that the ADC had ‘a stellar record’
on preventing suicide.”
The High Court continued, “She had to take
into account the evidence that Mr. Assange would be entitled to a
speedy trial within 70 days, and that the suggested delays caused by
pre-trial motions would not arise if he chose to take advantage of that
speedy trial provision. She also had to take into account the
possibility that Mr. Assange, who asserts that he has a complete defense
to the charges against him, will be acquitted.”
“She had to
consider carefully whether the required link between Mr. Assange’s
mental condition was satisfied when the evidence was that he would
pursue his intention to commit suicide with a ‘single-minded
determination.’”
The High Court was sympathetic but ultimately
rejected the ground for appeal that amounted to an attack on the
professional reputation of Professor Michael Kopelman. He is a clinical
psychiatrist who provided the most comprehensive assessment of Assange’s
condition in 2019 during the immediate months following his arrest and
expulsion from the Ecuador Embassy.
Declassified U.K. reported
days before the announcement that Assange’s “fate” was in the hands of
an appeal judge, Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett, “who is a close friend
of Sir Alan Duncan, the former foreign minister who called Assange a
‘miserable little worm’ in parliament.”
“The two have known each
other since their student days at Oxford in the 1970s, when Duncan
called Burnett ‘the Judge.’ Burnett and his wife attended Duncan’s
birthday dinner at a members-only London club in 2017, when Burnett was a
judge at the court of appeal.”
Duncan was “the key official in
the U.K. government[’s] campaign to force Assange from the embassy,”
according to Declassified U.K. Through a feed in an “operations room” in
the U.K. Foreign Office, he watched the British police drag Assange
from the embassy to a van. He could barely keep a smirk off his face and
later traveled to Ecuador to personally thank President Lenín Moreno
for expelling Assange.
Burnett was not present for the
announcement of the decision. Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde announced
the decision during proceedings that lasted a little more than ten
minutes.
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