PM should urge US to abandon pursuit of Julian Assange

The Herald's View

The decision of British judge Vanessa Baraitser to block the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States to face espionage charges was made on the grounds of his mental health and the regime under which he would be jailed there. This leaves important wider questions still at issue.

When this masthead teamed up with WikiLeaks in 2010 to publish the contents of the military and diplomatic cables at the heart of the current case, we said their revelations about the conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and about Canberra's relationship with Washington were overwhelmingly in the public interest. They came at a time when the US-instigated "war on terror", which Australia joined as a US ally, had seen conduct including torture, extraordinary rendition and drone strikes in foreign countries conducted under a cloak of state secrecy.

In September 2012, WikiLeaks and Mr Assange – as its founder – were designated enemies of the US state, putting them in the same legal category as al-Qaeda and the Taliban. This masthead opposed such a designation and said the experience of Australians Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks – long detained without charge at Guantanamo Bay – showed that successive Australian governments should be doing more to stand up for their citizens' rights.

Eight years on, the Morrison government has adopted the same passive stance as the Gillard government in 2012 and the Howard government in the cases of Mr Habib and Mr Hicks. Whether this is to maintain our alliance with Washington or to protect Australia's own regime of secrecy by discouraging current and future whistleblowers, this masthead believes such a stance is misguided and that the Prime Minister and his top diplomats should now urge either the outgoing Trump administration or the incoming Biden administration to abandon US pursuit of this case.

It is worth remembering that when Joe Biden was vice-president, charges against Mr Assange were contemplated but not pursued for fear of creating a precedent that might later be applied to journalists and that Chelsea Manning, the source of the leaks for which Mr Assange is now being prosecuted, had much of her unprecedented 35-year jail sentence commuted.

The charges for which the US Department of Justice has sought to extradite Mr Assange could see him sentenced to up to 175 years' jail under special administrative measures, an extreme form of solitary confinement which Judge Baraitser described in chilling terms.

RELATED ARTICLE

Opinion

Assange saga

Assange judge failed to realise what the case means for every journalist who ever received a secret document

Since the US has already said it will appeal, it would not be surprising if this case ends up running for several more years and eventually turning up at the European Court of Human Rights (whose jurisdiction in this case is unaffected by Brexit). Will Mr Biden, already facing many domestic challenges, really gain by persisting in a high-profile case which this week saw a foreign judge outline inadequacies in the US prison system?

It is important to remember that Judge Baraitser was not ruling on Mr Assange's guilt or innocence but on whether or not he could be fairly tried and jailed by US authorities. In answering "yes" to the first question, she discussed at length the balance between the right of states to secrecy in defending national security and of journalists to expose state misconduct.

Judge Baraitser ruled that Mr Assange had overstepped legal and ethical constraints in his pursuit of the leaked material and what he did no longer qualified as journalism for the purposes of protected speech. We have previously expressed concern about Mr Assange's release of identifying details from confidential diplomatic cables and we acknowledge there is a legitimate debate to be had about where he sits on the spectrum of traditional journalist to unfettered activist. However, this masthead has also repeatedly stated its belief that in Australia and elsewhere what authorities, including judges, consider to be "legitimate" investigative journalism is often based on narrow definitions that are weighted against the public interest.

Mr Biden might also look back on the past two decades of US politics and ask himself – as a torrent of misinformation, conspiracy theories about the "deep state" and resentment over the cost and character of decisions to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to distort American public debate – whether fighting hard for the cause of state secrecy is really how he wants his presidency to be remembered.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/pm-should-urge-us-to-abandon-pursuit-of-julian-assange-20210105-p56ry5.html?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1609832387