2024-02-21 20:29:01
The battle for the release of Julian Assange is political, cultural and judicial.
It starts with the false notion that Assange stole sensitive information belonging to the United States. Information cannot be stolen. You know it or you don’t know it, you access it or you don’t access it. The information has no owner. Governments and corporations use different legal and IT tools to prevent certain information from being known outside a closed circle of people supposedly authorized to access that information. For example, governments and corporations impose and use computer crime laws, criminalizing unauthorized access to certain information. They also use a combination of firewalls, encryption, secret keys, fingerprints and much more to complicate access to their servers and platforms. All this is done invoking the right to privacy. But this right has a limit, which is our right to inform freely and to be informed. This right also has a legal character in the democracies of the world and in many cases, including Argentina, constitutional status. This tension between the right to privacy and the right to be informed has until now been resolved by punishing those who obtain access information protected by law, but leaving those who publish it free of blame. Thanks to this protection of journalism, information of public interest has been revealed that certain governments and corporations preferred to keep hidden.
In the case of Assange, he published on Wikileaks information provided by Chelsea Manning, who was arrested, tried, convicted and subsequently pardoned for having obtained said information and shared it with Assange for publication. The United States government, clearly affected and exposed by Assange’s publications, sought an exemplary punishment so that other journalists would not follow in his footsteps. By not being able to accuse him of publishing, he accuses him of espionage. In other words, he accuses Assange of being part of an illicit association dedicated to spying on or stealing information from the United States. To make this accusation, the United States government, through its Attorney General’s Office, starts from the false premise that Assange’s publication site is not a journalistic medium. The United States Congress has defined Wikileaks as “a hostile private intelligence service.”
But of course, publishing is not the same as spying. Publishing, as its word indicates, is a public act. Spying, on the other hand, is a private act. It involves accessing information to be delivered confidentially to a government or corporation in exchange for money or some benefit. Returning to how the United States defines Wikileaks, the term “intelligence service” has no basis because there is no known evidence that Assange did anything else with the information she accessed other than publish it. Other publications, including some prestigious ones such as the century-old magazine The Economist, they have intelligence units that sell journalistic reports to private clients, but this is not the case with Wikileaks. As for “hostile,” well, no one likes it when another person accesses and reveals information that leaves you in a bad light. But let’s agree that this is a very subjective term, especially if it is used to describe the publication of true information of obvious public interest. And as for “private,” at least it is an admission that even the United States government itself recognizes that Assange is not an agent of any enemy government.
For four years Assange has been imprisoned in a maximum security prison in Great Britain with an extradition request from the United States, which accuses him of having violated provisions of that country’s Espionage Act, with charges that carry a sentence of up to 170 years. in prison. If Assange is extradited he will almost certainly be convicted because he would face a jury trial in eastern Virginia, the very heart of the US intelligence and national security communities. But he should not be extradited. First, because he is not a spy. Second, because the crime of espionage in any democratic judicial system is considered a political crime. And political crimes are not extraditable. Neither in the United States nor in Great Britain, nor in the extradition treaty between the two nor in any Western country.
Humanitarian arguments would also have to be considered. Assange has been caged for four years. He is kept alone for 23 hours a day and has 45 minutes to exercise in a cement patio. Previously, he had to remain locked up in three rooms of the small Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years with the same purpose of not being extradited to the United States. Such a regime has generated severe physical and mental deterioration in Assange, which has been criticized by the United Nations Working Group against Arbitrary Detentions and by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.
Until now, the government and justice of Great Britain have followed through on the extradition request, putting geopolitical interests and ideological convictions before what jurisprudence and the most basic common sense would indicate. They have done it in a long, tortuous and opaque process, with twists and turns, delays and restrictions for the defense. It seems that the objective is to extend the extradition and therefore Assange’s stay in an isolated and secure cell. Until he breaks, he gives up, he goes crazy or he dies.
It is difficult to imagine that a Democratic government like that of Joe Biden wants to try Assange in the United States and thus expose itself to a confrontation with the New York Timeshe Washington Post and defenders of the constitutional First Amendment that guarantees freedom of expression. It is also not imaginable that Biden would release a character who has been demonized for a decade by Washington hawks, the conservative media and much of Hollywood. That is why it does not seem a coincidence that Biden’s entire mandate has passed without the Assange situation being resolved. The position that Donald Trump, the favorite in the November elections, would take is different. Trump would supposedly love to set up a circus and send the lefty who messed up the military industrial complex and the intelligence services to the bonfire. And if the spectacle leads him to confront the “liberals” of the Times and the Posteven better.
But Assange’s extradition is not going to be so easy. Everything seems set for the next judicial round, through Assange’s appeal, to take place at the European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg. There it is likely that the United States will have less interference than in London and Assange will have a better chance of winning. But from there to getting Assange out of the English prison…difficult. Although even after Brexit, Great Britain remains part of the European justice system and recognizes its international courts, the Assange case has shown that in matters that affect its bilateral relationship with the United States, geopolitical interest can lead it to make judicial decisions. and executives to say the least questionable.
In the midst of this complex political, judicial and cultural plot, a global movement is growing that works on all fronts for Assange to be released, understanding that what is at stake is the right to be informed, a fundamental pillar of the democratic system. From a cultural point of view, it is important to understand that Assange is not a spy nor did he steal information. From the judicial point of view, political crimes are not extraditable. And from a political point of view, putting a limit on a powerful State that tries to impose a gigantic act of global censorship is almost a matter of survival for our battered and questioned democracies.