I will confess at the outset of this piece that my personal sympathy for Julian Assange, the founder of wikileaks, has always been – and remains – limited. It is not disputed that, at the height of wikileaks activities towards the tail end of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Assange’s outfit leaked data which contained the names of Afghans who had helped US and NATO forces in the fight against the Taliban, endangering their lives. That was, in my view, outrageously irresponsible. Nor, frankly, do I share the views of those who paint Assange’s decision to leak top secret data as an act of heroism from which he should be absolved of criminal responsibility. The US Government has a right to enforce its own laws, which – it would argue – are in place to protect its soldiers, citizens, and national interests. If you consciously and deliberately break those laws, you should be prepared to accept the consequences, which are well known.
That all said, Mr. Assange has been well and truly punished. Since 2019 he has been imprisoned in Belmarsh Prison, at his majesty’s pleasure, awaiting an extradition ruling on whether he will be sent to face American justice. The only crime which he has been convicted of in Britain is breaching his bail conditions following an arrest in 2012, when he sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. That offence carries a maximum prison sentence of one year; Mr. Assange has nevertheless been locked in Belmarsh for approaching five years.
Before that, he spent seven years under effective house arrest in the aforementioned embassy of Ecuador.
The background to his 2012 arrest and effective imprisonment – both in the embassy and Belmarsh prison – is a series of allegations of rape and sexual assault made against him in Sweden. Assange, contrary to some claims, was never unwilling to answer those accusations. He made himself available via videolink or in London to meet with Swedish investigators, claiming that if he went to Sweden he would be extradited to the United States, where he would face life imprisonment in a “Supermax” prison, effectively never allowed to see the light of day again.
The Swedish sexual assault cases are – viewed with the benefit of hindsight – strange, in that Sweden never seemed particularly urgent in prosecuting them. It took fully five years for the Swedes to agree to question Mr. Assange in London, and only then because the statute of limitations on the charges was set to expire. However, the request to meet with Assange in London was sent too late, and the statute expired anyway. Since the cases can never now be tried, Mr. Assange must live with the fact that his name will never be cleared, and if he is guilty, his victims must live with the fact that they will never now get justice.
Thus we have the bizarre situation where a man has been effectively locked up for over a decade having only ever been convicted of a single, minor, crime. All the while, the United States continues to seek his extradition to face charges of espionage, and a potential lifetime prison sentence.
This is manifestly unjust, not to mention highly unusual.
The US Government obviously retains the right to seek the extradition of Mr. Assange if it believes that he has broken that country’s laws. However, in this case, the UK Government has an obvious duty to refuse the request on the grounds that Mr. Assange has already spent more than a decade in confinement and endured a life-altering ordeal without ever having had the chance to answer for the original charges which commenced his incarceration – the Swedish sex allegations. It’s always important to remember that in any legal proceeding, the rights of the accused person are the same rights that would be granted to any one of us in the same position. In this case, is it really in the public interest to countenance a situation where you can be deprived of liberty for a dozen years on charges that are never brought to trial, and then sent off somewhere else on entirely different charges?
There’s another element to this as well: The US Government is charging Mr. Assange under the espionage act – effectively accusing him of spying. One does not need to agree with what Mr. Assange did to recognise that the leaking of data to the public is not an act of espionage, but of journalism. It might be an irresponsible act of journalism, but it remains journalism nevertheless. Mr. Assange, as a reporter, had no particular duty to protect the US Government’s secrets.
What’s more, the person who did have a duty to protect those secrets – Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning – has already been tried and convicted for the crime of leaking the data to wikileaks, and spent time in prison for it. It is hard not to see Mr. Assange’s ordeal in this context as something of a vendetta against him, because of the embarrassment he caused to the US military.
Sending him to the US, to face further charges, would be a travesty. He has already suffered unjustly as things stand, and will never get the last twelve years of his life back. The UK Government should tell the Americans, just this once, to bugger off.