By Linda Pearson
Since WikiLeaks raised the ire of the US government in 2010 through the publication of leaked diplomatic cables, PM Gillard’s conduct towards Australian founder, Julian Assange, has been reprehensible.
Gillard is yet to apologise for her inflammatory claims that Assange had acted illegally, despite the AFP’s subsequent findings that he had broken no laws. Her remarks were made at a time when she should have been defending Assange from the US politicians calling for his assassination, and stand in stark contrast to her recent statement that now-ex House of Representatives Speaker, Peter Slipper, and ex-ALP MP, Craig Thomson, should be “entitled to a presumption of innocence”.
The Gillard government’s conduct in this affair continues to highlight the need for the openness and accountability which WikiLeaks exists to promote.
When evidence of the existence of a sealed US grand jury indictment against Assange emerged in February this year, the government denied any knowledge of it. They continue to block the publication of documents relating to the potential extradition of Assange to the US, reportedly at the behest of the US government.
And we still don’t know, despite the Gillard government’s assurances that they would find out, why Assange’s former lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, was stopped at Heathrow Airport and told she was on an “inhibited” travel list.
Meanwhile, Ms Gillard’s government has been quietly passing legislation which will potentially make it easier for the them to extradite Assange to the US, should he ever return to Australia, and legislation which facilitates the US-led attacks against WikiLeaks.
This abrogation of our rights in deference to the US government is unacceptable. With the verdict in Assange’s final appeal against extradition to Sweden expected any day we need to remind PM Gillard that she’s answerable to us, the Australian people, not the US government.
We have organised a protest at the Sydney Convention Centre when Prime Minister Gillard speaks in Sydney on Tuesday May 15 to demand she acts immediately to stop attempts to extradite him there.
Where: Sydney Convention Centre, Darling Harbour
When: 1 pm, Tuesday 15 May
Organised by the Support Wikileaks and Assange Coalition. Contact Linda on 0401 511 588 for more information.
This article has been updated on 3 May 2012 – see below
After dodging and delaying FOI requests about its consideration of the case of Julian Assange for months, the government has blocked the release of any material that would reveal its internal legal deliberations over Assange’s extradition to the United States.
Greens Senator Scott Ludlam made an FOI application to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Attorney-General’s Department and their respective ministerial offices in December seeking documents relating to “the potential extradition or temporary surrender” of Assange to the US.
The response of the government has been a litany of excuses and self-justifications.
After several months, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is still seeking to avoid responding. In March, DFAT said it would take them a remarkable four months to process the request and demanded that Ludlam justify why a request for documents about Assange’s extradition was a matter in the public interest. At the end of March, DFAT demanded another 30 days on top of the four months, on the basis that they’d only just realised they would have to consult with foreign governments over the request.
The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet quickly fobbed off the request entirely by claiming that the request “would unreasonably divert the resources of the department”, an excuse permitted under s.24 of the FOI Act.
So far only Attorney-General’s has responded, after trying to unsuccessfully convince the Information Commissioner to re-extend the deadline for responding, and actually breaching the response deadline. The result (PDF), when it finally arrived in late March, featured extensive use of the famous black highlighter and bordered on nonsensical.
Among the treasures served up by Attorney-General’s were:
- Emails relating to AGD secretary Roger Wilkins questions about Assange’s extradition, redacted to the point of meaninglessness, on the basis of “legal professional privilege”;
- Detailed advice to Wilkins about Assange’s extradition, including the issue of his facing the death penalty, was entirely redacted (legal professional privilege)
- A question time brief for Robert McClelland, in which both the talking points and the background material is almost entirely redacted because it “could cause damage to Australia’s international relations”
- Emails between departmental staff about a request from McClelland’s office for “lines” for use in response to possible questions about Assange after a newspaper article.
- Correspondence from people concerned about the issue and media articles
- Some of the Greens’ own correspondence and notices of motion, one of which was bizarrely redacted despite being a public document.
The redactions prevent any assessment of what exactly the government knows about the US government’s sealed indictment for Assange. The government has played dumb on the issue, publicly declaring it knows nothing about the matter, despite it apparently being common knowledge in Washington circles (as revealed by the Stratfor emails) that a sealed indictment against Assange had been issued.
Update
Late today the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade sought an additional month to respond to Senator Ludlam’s FOI request “on the basis that continuing international consultation and the complexity of decision-making required prior to finalising the documents for release.” The continuing consultation raises the possibility of the US or Swedish governments seeking to veto the release of documents under Freedom of Information. DFAT’s deadline for responding will, if the Office of the Information Commissioner agrees, be extended to 3 June (DFAT has withdrawn the claim that it will take it 4 months to process the request). The new deadline effectively ensures that the Australian Government’s position vis-à-vis Assange won’t be revealed before the outcome of his appeal against his European Arrest Warrant is concluded.
http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/04/18/julian-assange-freedom-of-information-requests/
The Australian Greens are demanding the Australian Government take action to ensure WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange’s legal and consular rights are upheld.
-
-
The Australian Greens are demanding the Australian Government take action to ensure WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange’s legal and consular rights are upheld.
On 1-2 February, Mr Assange’s appeal in the UK Supreme Court was heard on whether a prosecutor is a judicial authority and can legitimately issue a European Arrest Warrant. The decision by the 7 Supreme Court justices considering the matter could come as soon as 1 March, after which Mr Assange could find himself on his way to a holding cell in Stockholm. Thereafter, there is the potential for him to be transferred to the United States.
We are concerned that our government has done nothing to investigate the secret US Grand Jury investigation into Wikileaks, which could lead to Assange’s extradition to the US.
SEP (Australia) first national congress
9 May 2012
The following is the sixth of seven resolutions passed unanimously at the first national congress of the Socialist Equality Party (Australia) held from April 6 to 9, 2012 in Sydney (see: “Australian SEP holds first national congress”).See resolutions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7.
1. This Congress denounces the Labor government’s intimate involvement in the conspiracy by the Obama administration to railroad WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to jail. By refusing to defend the basic legal rights of the Australian citizen, the Gillard government has played a crucial role in the operation against him.
2. The persecution of Assange and WikiLeaks is part of a full-scale global assault on basic political and democratic rights. Its aim is to intimidate and silence mounting popular opposition to the program of militarism and austerity being imposed on working people around the world.
3. Internal emails obtained from the US private intelligence firm Stratfor indicate that the Obama administration has had a secret Grand Jury indictment against Assange since December 2010. Detained in Britain for more than a year, he faces extradition to Sweden on baseless sex charges. The entire frame-up is designed to pave the way for Assange’s extradition to the US, where he would be tried under the reactionary Espionage Act of 1917.
4. What is in store for the WikiLeaks founder has already been carried out against alleged WikiLeaks source Private Bradley Manning. Manning has been incarcerated in US military brigs for nearly two years, and subjected to solitary confinement, forced nakedness, sleep deprivation and other torture. The purpose is to force him into a plea bargain that will provide a basis for the US government’s case against Assange.
5. Washington is campaigning to vilify Assange and destroy WikiLeaks because the site has exposed thousands of documents detailing US killings of civilians and complicity in torture in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with numerous other crimes previously hidden from the world’s population. Among the cables made public are those revealing the close involvement of the US embassy with the Labor powerbrokers who ousted Kevin Rudd as prime minister in mid-2010, and installed Julia Gillard.
6. Gillard has backed the persecution of Assange from the outset. In December 2010—just as the Grand Jury was being secretly convened—she publicly declared, without any evidence or legal justification, the WikiLeaks publication of US cables “illegal.” Her government did everything possible to assist the US operation, authorising an investigation by intelligence services and the Australian Federal Police to dig up whatever they could find to try and compromise Assange.
7. By throwing Assange to the wolves, Labor seeks to cover up Washington’s crimes and the role of Australian governments in them, as well as to keep a lid on the broader machinations of US imperialism and their implications for the working class. The Gillard government is playing a no less pernicious role than the Howard government did when it backed the Bush administration’s detention of two Australian citizens, David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, along with more than 650 other prisoners, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in defiance of the Geneva Conventions and international law.
8. The operations against all three men have been part of the ongoing and fraudulent “war on terrorism.” Starting with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, this “war” has provided the pretext for military aggression abroad, and a barrage of police-state measures at home. Like the Obama administration, which has deepened the far-reaching assault on democratic rights and precedents launched under Bush, the Labor government has escalated and institutionalised the authoritarian “anti-terror” measures initiated by its predecessor.
9. The bipartisan assault on democratic rights has been endorsed by the entire political establishment, including the Greens. The minority Labor government, which is propped up by the Greens, has retained and intensified all the draconian measures introduced since 2000—detention without trial, secret interrogation, military call-out legislation, an unprecedented military intervention into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, and ever harsher anti-refugee laws.
10. The record demonstrates the lack of any significant constituency within Australian ruling circles for a commitment to fundamental democratic and legal rights. With barely a murmur in the media, Labor has repeatedly blocked legal actions challenging Canberra’s participation in US-led torture, renditions and Guantánamo Bay detentions, as well as arbitrary deportations and ASIO black-bans of refugees, and seizures of the passports of Australian citizens.
11. The deepening crisis of the capitalist system is at the root of these measures. It has become increasingly impossible for the ruling elites to impose militarism, glaring inequality and the ongoing assault on social and working conditions by democratic means.
12. This Congress salutes the courageous stand taken by Assange and WikiLeaks and will fight for their defence. Assange and WikiLeaks have helped lay bare, in the eyes of millions of people globally, the real conduct and character of the US and other governments around the world, including in Canberra.
13. This Congress demands the immediate release of both Assange and Manning. It insists that the defence of their democratic rights is inseparable from the fight to mobilise the working class against the Labor government, which is a direct accomplice of Washington’s conspiracy against them. Democratic rights cannot be defended through the decayed façade of parliament, but only through the fight for a workers’ government, committed to the reorganisation of society on the basis of human need, not private profit, and the establishment of genuine democracy in every aspect of economic, political and social life.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/may2012/res6-m09.shtml
Friday, 20 April 2012 - by Guy Rundle
Within weeks or days, WikiLeaks supremo and now TV host Julian Assange will find out from the UK Supreme Court whether he is to be extradited to Sweden for further questioning on four accusations (no charges have been laid) on sexual matters — two misdemeanour “annoyance” accusations, one of sexual coercion and one of third degree sexual assault/rape.
Now, in a case already mired in controversy, new evidence has come to light, which suggests that the testimony of one of the complainants has been fabricated in order to supply sufficient evidence to “fit” a criminal charge.
Comparison between the evidence given by Anna Ardin, the complainant attached to the first three accusations, and the legal wording of the key complaint by her against Assange, show that it is suspiciously similar to a paragraph in a high-profile 2009 Amnesty International Report on sex crimes in the Nordic countries. Read the rest of this entry »
Updated Press Release - Mon May 7 2012
Tuesday 8 May, 12:30 PM London time
The Bahraini activist, Nabeel Rajab, has been subject to legal harrassment in retaliation for his activities as a protest leader in Bahrain. On Saturday, 5th of May, Rajab was arrested by plain clothes policemen at Manama airport. He was returning from Lebanon, where according to the spokespeople from the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, he had been meeting with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. On Sunday he appeared in court on charges of taking part in “in illegal assembly and calling others to join.” The Bahrain interior ministry has stated that Rajab was under arrest “for committing a number of crimes punishable by law.”
Nabeel Rajab appears as a guest on the fourth episode of “The World Tomorrow,” which is to be broadcast on Tuesday 8th of May, at 12:30 London time. The episode is an interview between Julian Assange, who has been under house arrest without charge for over 500 days, and two leading Arab revolutionaries in the middle of conflict: Alaa Abd El-Fattah from Egypt and Nabeel Rajab from Bahrain. The episode will air thoughout Tuesday in English, Spanish, Arabic, Italian and Russian, starting from 12:30 PM London time, 7:30 AM (New York), 13.30 PM (Rome), 15:30 PM (Moscow) and 9:30 PM (Sydney/Melbourne). RT will air the episode 12 times on Tuesday on its international cable network which covers over 430 million subscribers, including 53 million in the United States on Comcast and Warner.
The show will be aired in Italian by L’Espresso Group in Italy. The episode will be available online immediately after broadcasting. Transcripts and URLs will be available at http://worldtomorrow.wikileaks.org
At the time of the interview all three participants were in the middle of serious legal and political attacks. Assange notes, “When this show was filmed, Nabeel Rajab was free. When it is broadcast, he will be in detention. In the show, he told me that he fully expected to pay a high price for his work in Bahrain. The 4th of May proved him right. It will be interesting to see what the government of Bahrain does in reaction to what he has to say.”
More information about the programme and inquiries into licensing should be made via the show’s website: http://worldtomorrow.wikileaks.org/contact.html
07/may/2012 by RussiaToday
***
Bahrain authorities have arrested the country’s most prominent human rights activist and harsh critic of the state’s ruling family. Nabeel Rajab was detained just days before his appearance on Julian Assange’s show here on RT. In the programme, which airs on Tuesday, the whistleblower gets an insight from him, and a fellow Egyptian activist, into the uprisings in the Arab States. RT spoke with London-based author and journalist Afshin Rattansi, who believes that Nabeel Rajab and his fellow activists have a lot of challenges to face in the future.
RT on Twitter http://twitter.com/RT_com
Socialist Alliance gay and lesbian rights spokesperson Rachel Evans spoke in Sydney on April 24 at a rally calling to free accused WikiLeaks’ source Private Bradley Manning from prison in the US, where he is being held in solitary confinement. The protest was part of an international day of protest for Manning, who faces a court martial and possible life in prison if convicted. Evans’ speech is below.
* * *
We are one of the many groups across 14 countries around the world taking action today because Bradley Manning is, once again, being subjected to a kangaroo court — a military “pre-trial” in Fort Meade.
Twenty-four-year-old Bradley Manning is a hero to us. But he frightens the US. The most powerful nation in the world — with its war drones, nuclear arsenal, its military bases, its air force, and all its soldiers, has decided Bradley Manning is a threat.
As a soldier in the US army, stationed in Iraq from October 2010 onwards, Manning dealt with data that showed the US and their allies are war criminals and are robbing the resources of the global South. Manning is alleged to be the source of the biggest leak of US secrets in history. It is alleged he leaked this evidence to WikiLeaks.
He faces a potential life sentence.
Manning served in the US military when you could not be openly gay. Manning defied this homophobic policy — showing the same moral determination that would later assist the people of the Middle East dying under US occupation and war. In his own way, Manning rebelled against the homophobia of the US army.
It is just one reason why we salute Manning. He is a hero to all for standing up against homophobia. A prejudice that causes high rates of suicide among queer youth and should be relegated to the dustbin of history. Manning is a role model for young people standing up against bigotry.
Recently, US President Barack Obama ended the US military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy — finally allowing working class and poor queers — many of whom join the army simply for a chance to get an education — to be out of the closet.
But Obama has not changed the core nature of that army, which has brought so much horror, war and terror to Afghanistan and Iraq, so the US can cement its economic and strategic dominance in the region.
Manning is also gender queer. From the emails between himself and the man who sold him out to the FBI, Adrian Lamo, it is evident that Manning was trying to work out if he wanted to be a woman.
Manning was stationed in eastern Baghdad from October 2009, where he accessed thousands of files which showed the US imposing its will on people all over the global South. Acccessing these files for up to 14 hours a day, he questioned the role of US power in the world as he questioned his own identity.
That Manning was gay and potentially transitioning to become a woman is important. He knew what it was to be bullied. To be ridiculed. To be denied dignity. Knowing this, he also had empathy for the Iraqi people who were also being denied dignity and a normal life.
The US-led occupation, which includes Australian soldiers, has killed more than 1 million people in Iraq over 20 years of occupation. Women, children, men: all have lost their lives.
The invasion of Iraq has not brought democracy, women’s rights or freedom. The war was always about control of Iraq’s resources.
This was best articulated by an Iraqi high school student I saw speak at a Melbourne rally against the Gulf War in 1991. She said: “If my people’s blood was made of oil, you would not have come to kill us.”
Manning showed human sympathy with the victims of US power in the global south. In the chatlog transcript with Lamo, Manning said he has access to “260,000 state department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world, explaining how the first world exploits the third, in detail, from an internal perspective”.
He also said he felt he had to take action because “it might actually change something”.
If Manning is indeed the source of leaks to WikiLeaks, then he is a hero who has helped change the world. The world will never be the same after WikiLeaks’ releases.
WikiLeaks has helped provide the anti-war movement, and democracy movements throughout the world, with the arguments and the confidence they need.
We need to continue to build such movements that challenge the US and Australian occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. The Australian government says they will leave Afghanistan. This is a victory for the movement and mass opposition to the occupation. But they also say they will leave special forces in the country.
But Australia and other occupiers must take all the troops out. They should leave Afghanistan, pay war reparations and rebuild what they have destroyed.
And they should pull all the troops from Iraq. The US’s so-called withdrawal from Iraq has left thousands of soldiers and private US paid mercenaries stationed in the country.
Like Manning, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is also facing persecution because he dared to reveal the truth. Assange has been held under house arrest without charge in Britain for more than 500 days.
Defending Manning and defending Assange and WikiLeaks is part of building the anti-war movement today.
This means we also need to turn the heat up on the Australian government, which has happily sacrificed human lives to secure the profits and power of the 1%.
Press Release – Fri May 4 16:45:40 UTC 2012
Julian Assange show ‘The World Tomorrow’ Episode 4: Egypt & Bahrain
Tuesday 8 May, 12:30 PM London time
The forth episode of “The World Tomorrow” will be an interview between Julian Assange, who has been under house arrest without charge for over 500 days, and two leading Arab revolutionaries in the mididle of conflict, Alaa Abd El-Fattah from Egypt and Nabeel Rajab from Bahrain. The episode will air thoughout Tuesday in English, Spanish, Arabic, Italian and Russian, starting from 12:30 PM London time, 7:30 AM (New York), 13.30 PM (Rome), 15:30 PM (Moscow) and 9:30 PM (Sydney/Melbourne). RT will air the episode 12 times on Tuesday on its international cable network which covers over 430 million subscribers, including 53 million in the United States on Comcast and Warner. The show will be aired in Italian by L’Espresso Group in Italy. The episode will be available online immediately after broadcasting. Transcripts and URLs will be available at http://worldtomorrow.wikileaks.org
Assange notes, “Is the Arab spring an unfolding dream or an impossible fantasy? I look past the media spin and conspire directly with its human participants.”
At the time of the interview all three participants were in the middle of serious legal and political attacks. Read the rest of this entry »
A new play started showing at Gate Theatre in London entitled “Tenet” which has French mathematician Évariste Galois and Julian Assange as characters.
by CaTV – 4 may 2012
-
Like a lot of Australians, I was not just disappointed but actually shocked by the attitude of Julia Gillard and her government – many of the senior members of government – to Julian Assange and the major Wikileaks release of 250,000 documents that started in 2010.
It was an emotive response to a number of factors; one of which being “those leaks”, that were published a few days before. They were the ones that named Mark Arbib as an informer, an insider who informed on the workings of our government to a foreign power. It might be an ally, but it’s still a foreign power, and you don’t do that. You don’t tell a foreign power what’s going on inside your own government… Imagine that the other way round; if Australian Intelligence had been receiving information about the internal workings of Obama’s government, and sending it back to Canberra. This would have been… you can imagine the reaction in the US. The fact that there was virtually no reaction illustrates the servant-master relationship; post-colonial relationship; NEO-colonial relationship that we have with the United States.
We are the willing Deputy Sheriff, and nothing has illustrated that more than the reaction Julia Gillard had when she claimed, completely wrongly – and the woman’s a LAWYER, for God’s sake – that Julian Assange was in breach of the law and that he had done something illegal. Then it was put to the federal police and what did they say? “No, he hasn’t broken any law”.
The other terrible thing at that time, was that Attorney General McClelland said that he would examine the state of Assange’s passport, as though he might not be allowed back into Australia – a last refuge, one would have thought, if the forces of authority are hunting him throughout the world. But what does the Australian government do? It says we’ll examine his passport to see if he can be kept out. The last person they did something like that to was Wilfred Burchett, so presumably they see Assange, in his own way, as as dangerous as Burchett – the last thing we had as a real renegade journalist – who didn’t take the government’s orders and reported as he wished. But that was decades ago…
So is Assange the new bête noir of the Australian government? Presumably he is.
My feeling about Julian Assange is that he should be celebrated. He is someone who has gone off in pursuit of truth. That’s all. He’s like Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers, which showed the dark side of the Vietnam War (it was all the dark side really) and Assange; what he’s been trying to do is to get papers which will show the unseen side of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. From a journalistic point of view, you have to remember that these wars have not been reported. They have gone UNREPORTED. Why is that? The last wars that were reported in any way objectively… the last one was Vietnam, where reporters were on the ground as free agents and could report what they saw. A number of them died in that process, but they got the news out as they saw it. Read the rest of this entry »
May 3, 2012 | By Trevor Timm
Today, governments and organizations around the globe are celebrating World Press Freedom Day, marked by the United Nations in Tunisia this year at a week-long conference. As usual, the U.S. will play a prominent role in the celebration, with the State Department sending its own delegation, and a U.S. representative delivering remarks at the opening ceremony.
But as the State Department touts its press freedom record in a press release today and encourages other countries to improve their own laws, it’s also important to critically look at the U.S.’s current approach to press freedom, in particular their statement that “the United States honors and supports media freedom at home and abroad.”
Journalists‘ sources in the U.S. have been the hardest hit in recent years. The current administration has used the Espionage Act to prosecute a record six whistleblowers for leaking information to the press—more than the rest of the previous administrations combined. Many of these whistleblowers have exposed constitutional violations such as the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program and the CIA’s waterboarding practices—issues clearly in the public interest—and now face years in prison. Meanwhile, the Justice Department has brought no prosecutions for the crimes underlying the exposed allegations.
In addition, a grand jury is reportedly still investigating WikiLeaks for violations of the Espionage Act for publishing classified information—a practice that has traditionally been protected by the First Amendment and which other newspapers engage in regularly. It would not only be completely unprecedented to prosecute a publisher under the archaic statute, but would also endanger many U.S. based publications like the New York Times. And as former State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley has remarked, the U.S. government’s investigation into WikiLeaks undermines the United States’ ability to pressure countries like Russia and China to allow greater press freedom. Read the rest of this entry »
02 mai 2012
Pour son émission «The world Tomorow» diffusée sur la télévision russe Russia Today, le célèbre fondateur de Wikileaks a interviewé le Président tunisien Moncef Marzouki. Ce dernier avoue «admirer son travail» et lui propose de s’installer en Tunisie en cas de problème…
Mardi 1er mai, le Président de la République Tunisien, Moncef Marzouki, s’est prêté aux questions de Julian Assange, le du fondateur très controversé de Wikileaks. L’interview, a été enregistrée en duplexe-vidéo ; Marzouki au Palais de Carthage, Assange dans un manoir en Grande-Bretagne où il est assigné à résidence,
Interrogé sur les Etats-Unis, un pays qui se veut défenseur de droits de l’homme mais qui est «engagé dans la torture» selon les termes d’Assange qui évoque au passage le cas de Bradley Manning, soldat américain détenu pour avoir révélé des informations à Wikileaks, Marzouki affirme avoir refusé, il y a deux ans, de se rendre aux Etats-Unis à l’invitation d’ONG pour parler des droits de l’homme. Il ne pouvait pas discuter des droits de l’homme avec un pays qui les bafoue, explique-t-il, faisant ainsi référence à la prison de Guantanamo.
L’article intégral sur Tekiano.com
http://directinfo.webmanagercenter.com/2012/05/02/tunisie-julian-assange-invite-par-moncef-marzouki/
By The Sail, on May 3, 2012
Source from onlineopinion, 24 April 2012
If he doesn’t win it means that anyone can be extradited from the UK, be arrested and put into detention at the behest of any prosecutor anywhere in Europe without having to show any evidence, without being charged and without proper judicial oversight. So I have faith that the British justice system should not and cannot stand for this sort of precedent.
(Jennifer Robinson, legal adviser to Julian Assange, speaking to Chris Uhlmann, Australian Broadcasting Commission, 2nd Feb, 2012.)
On 2nd November the Queen’s Bench division of the High Court dismissed an appeal by the founder of Wikileaks against extradition to Sweden to face trial for rape and related crimes. It rejected each of four grounds of appeal. On December 16th the Supreme Court ruled that the most important of these, a claim that the Swedish Prosecution Authority was not a valid ‘judicial authority’ to issue an arrest warrant, was of such public importance as to justify a hearing before seven judges. The outcome of this hearing, argued on 1st and 2nd February, will confirm whether Ms. Robinson’s faith in the British system of justice is well-founded.
The question has aroused widespread concern, with rallies scheduled in major cities around the world, to be held when the decision is announced in May. So what is this case about, why have the Justices granted an appeal, and what might Assange reasonably expect?
The outstanding feature of the High Court’s judgment was its reluctance to acknowledge incompatible aims in the 2003 Act. The government’s aim was to facilitate extradition, primarily by the mutual recognition of the arrest practices of member states; but the Court also affirmed the scheme’s aim to respect the basic rights of those deported, which include a right to due process. This aim was explicit in the European Framework Decision, a pre-legislative treaty setting out the essentials of the scheme; the Court affirmed that, although this Framework Decision was not referred to in the British Act, it must govern its interpretation.
The Court explained that constitutional principles supporting basic rights were so important that they must be upheld even if Member States chose to ignore them; accordingly, while it was a matter for each State to designate its own warrant issuing authority, this would not apply ‘if the authority were self-evidently not a judicial authority’; thus,
… if a warrant was issued by a Ministry of Justice which the Member State had designated as an authority … it would not … be a valid EAW under the Framework Decision … it would self-evidently not have been issued by a body which, on principles universally accepted in Europe, was judicial.
Surprisingly, after this promising start the Court ignored these principles. It made no attempt to clarify them; nor did it explain why, if a minister’s warrant is a ‘self-evident’ violation, this is not true of arrest warrants issued by lesser officials, such as a police officer, customs official or public prosecutor. Why did the principles universally accepted in Europe not exclude them, given they might likewise rest on executive policy or administrative convenience? This is just as clear as in the hypothetical case of a justice minister. Read the rest of this entry »
