After a lengthy legal battle, the WikiLeaks co-founder and investigative journalist faces extradition to the US
Today, hundreds of people gathered outside the Royal Court of Justice, London, to show support for Julian Assange. After a long legal process, the whistleblower and WikiLeaks co-founder is set to find out whether he will finally be extradited to the US, where he faces prosecution under spying charges and a lifetime sentence in a high-security prison.
Assange – an Australian journalist who co-founded WikiLeaks in 2006 – has been imprisoned in London for five years, following a seven-year period where he sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy.
WikiLeaks has published an estimated 10 million documents, many of which exposed corruption and war crimes carried out by the US armed forces. One of its most explosive revelations came in 2010, when it released footage from a military helicopter which showed American soldiers killing civilians in Baghdad. It also published thousands of documents sourced by whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who was subsequently prosecuted by the military and endured years of solitary confinement.
Unsurprisingly, these activities didn’t win him any friends in the US government: the Department of Justice described the leaks in 2019 as “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States”, and accused him of endangering the lives of American soldiers. He was charged with 18 offences, including the charge of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion”, and the US government was granted permission to extradite him.
Assange has spent the last five years trying to appeal this decision. If he is unsuccessful today, he will have exhausted his avenues within the British justice system, but he could still have a chance at the European Court of Human Rights (EHCR) in Strasbourg. The EHCR, however, has previously refused to hear his case, so this could be the end of the line.
If this happens, he faces a rough time in the US, a country where senior intelligence figures have plotted to assassinate him. According to Amnesty International, he is at risk of human rights violations in prison, including prolonged periods of solitary confinement and poor health services.
There has been a wave of support for Assange as he faces extradition. In Paris, the Russian artist Andrei Molodkin has vowed to destroy some of the world’s most precious artwork – including pieces by Picasso, Rembrandt and Andy Warhol, which he has locked in a crate with a corrosive substance – if the whistleblower dies in prison. He has described this as an optimistic art installation (he believes this outcome will be avoided), rather than an act of protest, but it speaks to the strength of feeling on the subject that so many collectors have donated priceless artefacts.
Assange can count a number of high-profile figures among his supporters, including Jeremy Corbyn, Brazilian President Lula de Silva, and the economist Yanis Varoufakis (the late Vivienne Westwood, meanwhile, designed his wife’s wedding dress.) He has become a cause celebre, lauded in some circles as a martyr being persecuted for speaking truth to power.
While that narrative is largely true, Assange is a complicated figure. He sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy not to avoid being prosecuted for whistleblowing, but because he faced extradition to Sweden after being accused of rape and sexual assault by two different women. Some of his supporters – including his UK lawyer at the time – argued this was part of a conspiracy to discredit, but many others consider the allegations credible.
Still, these allegations are not the reason why the US government is trying to extradite him, and if they are true, prosecuting him on whistleblowing charges is no kind of justice. As Amnesty International’s Julia Hall argued, what’s at stake, in this case, is the global freedom of the press, the right for journalists to expose the abuse of power, and fundamental issues of human rights. All of this remains true, whether or not Assange is a good person.