The Assange Case And Why Its More Relevant Than Ever
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Stella Assange, wife and lawyer of Julian Assange, recently participated in a conference at Sapienza University, shedding light on the importance of mobilizing around her husband's case.
Timeline of Julian Assange’s case
From 2010 on, Julian Assange published hundreds of thousands of classified files, representing the largest security breach of its kind in U.S. military history, on his platform called Wikileaks. Its first leaks came from former US army soldier Chelsea Manning. The documents included the Warlogs, which revealed the true nature of warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the Cablegate, which contained a quarter-million cables from American diplomats stationed around the world.
As a result of these publications, the Department of Justice sought to pursue criminal charges against Assange. However, the Obama administration eventually held back from taking action, fearing it would infringe on the First Amendment.
In contrast, Chelsea Manning was given a 35-year prison sentence before being pardoned under the Obama administration. Despite this, she still went through an additional 18 months of prison after refusing to give her testimony in a grand jury trial against Assange.
Between 2011 and 2015 Wikileaks multiplied its revelations including the Guantanamo files, a publication of the files of Guantanamo prisoners, and the Syria files, revealing the collusion between the Syrian government and Western firms. Wikileaks also revealed in 2015 that the NSA had spied on three successive French presidents.
In 2016 Trump came into power, originally praising Wikileaks for its publication of democrat campaign documents and emails during the presidential campaign. This leak was thoroughly reproached to Assange as biased and part of a Russian agenda to manipulate the American elections. However, in 2017 Assange incurred the wrath of the Trump administration with the publication of Vault-7: revelations about the CIA's cyberwarfare arsenal.
In 2018, 8 years after the initial publications of WikiLeaks, a prosecutor mistakenly revealed in an unrelated case that criminal charges had been secretly filed against Julian Assange.
In April 2019, two years after the presidency change in Ecuador, and 7 years after Julian’s obtention of his asylum, Assange was stripped of his Ecuadorian nationality. Subsequently, his political refugee status was revoked, forcing his departure from the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he had been staying since 2012. That same day he was arrested by the British authorities. The British justice sentenced Julian to 50 weeks in prison for skipping bail 7 years earlier on an unrelated case, in which charges had since been dropped.
As soon as Assange exited the Ecuadorian embassy the United States Department of Justice revealed 17 new charges against Assange. After having sought for years to extradite Assange on charges of hacking, which would have led to a maximum sentence of 5 years in prison, the United States indicted him under the espionage act - a charge adopted under World War one. Thus meaning that Assange would face up to 175 years of reclusion.
A highly contentious case
Though Assange has been criticized within the editorial world for his publication in bulk of non-curated secret material, the documents published by WikiLeaks gave the constituents a possibility to level the field with power holders - they put in the open evidence of wrongdoing. Nevertheless, instead of there being a reckoning for the crimes evidenced in the documents, Stella Assange emphasizes that Julian has been victimized.
Since 2019, Julian has been fighting extradition, his lawyers handling various appeals in a spider web of legal processes. In January 2021, his extradition was refused by the British justice, leading to a subsequent appeal by the United States. The decision was then overturned, and in June 2021 his extradition was ratified by the then British home secretary Priti Patel. Currently, his case is in the hands of the High Court of Great Britain. In case of loss, the case will be appealed in the European Court of Human Rights.
In the meantime, Assange has since the 7th of December 2020 been detained illegally in the high security prison of Belmarsh in England, described by Stella Assange as the Guantanamo prison of the United Kingdom.
She emphasizes that the case is not a legal one but a political one, her claims being sustained by the 2021 revelations that Mike Pompeo, ex-director of the CIA, attempted to have Assange killed or sequestered while in the Ecuadorian embassy.
For Stella, the on-going prosecution of her husband highlights the creation of a new paradigm threatening the freedom of the press, where the truth is not to be published if it does not align with national interest. It is worth noting that as feared by Obama, this case goes against the very First Amendment of the United States. However, Assange would not be protected by the latter as he is not an American citizen.
It is worth noting that the Julian Assange case was considered one of the three most important problematics in the European Union, as he was nominated in 2022 for the Sakharov Prize, an annual human rights award presented by the European Parliament to individuals or organizations who have made an outstanding contribution to protecting freedom of thought.
Up until last year, Londoners were regularly reminded of Julian Assange by the protests against his extradition in front of Parliament, but today, more than ever, it is important to mobilize for the man who fought for the freedom of the press and is today in a high security prison - ironically not serving a sentence. With the potential extradition of Assange to the United States looming, it is crucial that we continue to fight for his rights and the principles of free speech and transparency that he has come to represent.