Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has spent almost four years in pretrial detention at the high-security Belmarsh prison. One of the last times he was seen in public was dragged by four agents into a police van in front of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, after spending 2,487 days locked up trying to avoid being extradited to Sweden. He is now exhausting his last cartridge against his extradition to the United States. If the British High Court rejects his appeal, he could be sentenced to up to 175 years in jail. The decision could be announced in the coming weeks. "Are you asking how Julian is?" sighed his wife, Stella Assange, at the European Parliament in Strasbourg last week. “He suffers deeply. There is no reason for him to be in prison. And the charges against him in the US put our democracies in danger, ”she denounced.
Australian Julian Assange is a controversial figure. For his defenders, he is an activist against corruption and human rights violations capable of risking everything to expose the truth. For some governments he is a fanatical hacker who has endangered the security of the State. This pulse has been disputed for 12 years, when thanks to the documents leaked by the soldier Chelsea Mannings the world learned about the crimes committed by the US army in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since its creation, WikiLeaks has exposed cases of espionage between allies, corruption schemes at the highest level and even emails from the 2016 Democratic campaign. "How can you convict someone for publishing the truth?" Stella Assange wondered. .
“From the Pentagon Papers to the Panama Papers, some of the most important journalism in recent decades – including Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations – has happened because it is legal to publish secret documents even if their sources obtained them through illicit means. It is the basis of investigative journalism,” says Miren Gutiérrez, a journalist and professor at the University of Deusto who worked for several years in financial investigation in Panama. The US accuses Julian Assange of violating the Espionage Act, a World War I rule that had never been used to prosecute a publisher. The activist faces a lifetime deprived of liberty not for leaking, but for publishing. Something that his wife stressed on numerous occasions to warn of the danger of the case for the future of the right of expression and publication and that, according to her, is not sufficiently understood by the general public or by most journalists.
Many argue that this is a much bigger case than Assange. “WikiLeaks' release of hundreds of thousands of secret documents exposing war crimes and rights violations revealed to the world information of public interest. If he is extradited, he will be the first editor to be tried by the Espionage Law, which does not allow defending himself on the grounds of public interest. Neither he nor any other publisher, journalist or source anywhere in the world will be able to adequately defend themselves if this dangerous precedent is set," Rebecca Vincent, Reporters Without Borders' director of operations, told the BBC.
Stella Assange claims that it is an extraterritorial case. “Neither Julian is a US citizen nor was he in his territory at the time the cables came to light. In addition, they were published in European media. The accusations against him could be applied against any other European journalist, ”she warned. A few weeks ago, the five newspapers that exposed the WikiLeaks cables in 2010 – New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and El País – published a joint editorial warning that a “dangerous precedent” was being set. “Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a central part of a journalist's job. If that work is criminalized, our public discourse and our democracies are significantly weakened”, they defended.
“I don't know what will happen to Assange, but there are no legal reasons to prosecute him and it would not set a good precedent for journalism. I doubt that Biden wants this trial to be part of his legacy, ”says Gutiérrez. Three administrations have already passed through the White House since the publication of Cablegate. Despite his desire, Barack Obama concluded that he could not persecute Assange because he was protected by the First Amendment (freedom of expression and of the press), something that changed with the arrival of Donald Trump. Not only did he decide to go against him through the Espionage Law, but the CIA even considered kidnapping and murdering him. Now many do not understand that the Biden administration is continuing with the case. "Beyond all the arguments about freedom of the press, do you want to send a person to the country who wanted to kill him and who was taking steps to do so?" Denounces his wife.
