The Australian citizen of rape in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan isn’t a citizen of the United States: a verdict on the Assange espionage charge
The decision Monday by two judges on Britain’s High Court of Justice clears the way for a full appeal hearing in which the First Amendment could be argued to be limited by his nationality. Australian citizens don’t have the same rights in the United States.
In court on Monday, one of Assange’s lawyers questioned the assurances that have since been made by U.S. prosecutors, pointing out that the separation of powers in the United States meant that the executive branch responsible for charging Assange would be unable to force the judicial branch — in the form of a federal court in Virginia — to accept certain parameters for the trial.
Swedish prosecutors ultimately dropped the rape charges, but Assange was forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian embassy and placed in Belmarsh, a maximum security prison in southeast London, as the U.S. unveiled its charges against him.
If the judges decide that he does not face the same legal protections in the U.S. as he does in Britain, then he will be released.
Critics of the U.S. government’s pursuit of Assange hailed Monday’s decision as an important victory, but warned the American prosecution efforts continued to overshadow press freedom.
The Espionage Act is one of the charges that was brought against the Australian for publishing classified information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The act requires prosecutors to show that the journalist and activist obtained national defense information and then uploaded it to the internet with the intent to harm the United States.
Dozens of supporters chanted and held bullhorns as they watched the hearing in central London at the Royal Courts of Justice.
U.S. Attorney Michael Assange vs. the High Court in the Leakage and Publication of Military Secrets: Comments on a Transcript of an Interview with A.A. Manning
His wife Stella — who originally met him when working on his legal team — had said in a recent interview with Reuters that she was concerned he could have been placed on a plane to the U.S. as soon as this week, where he could theoretically face up to 175 years in prison.
In February, lawyers for Assange submitted nine separate grounds for a possible appeal, but then in March the two High Court judges, Victoria Sharp and Adam Johnson, responded to those requests by saying there was a “real prospect of success” on only three grounds.
In 2010, as he founded the organization, he gained global prominence when he released hundreds of thousands of classified documents about the U.S. military’s activities in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The U.S. wants to charge him with 17 acts of espionage and one count of computer misuse, for an alleged conspiracy to take possession of and then publish national defense information.
Two judges at the High Court in London today said Assange can officially challenge his extradition order from the United Kingdom in the long-running dispute over the leaking and publication of military secrets.
Assange’s attorneys say he could face up to 175 years in prison, though US prosecutors have claimed publicly that they expect him to serve no more than five.
Prosecutors in the US allege that Assange, 52, overstepped his role as a journalist in online conversations with a source, Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst, by allegedly offering to help the then-22-year-old private crack a hashed password that could have hypothetically furthered her illicit access to a classified Defense Department network.
Manning, who spent more than a year and a half in pretrial confinement, confessed in 2013 to leaking more than 750,000 documents. A third of the cache contained diplomatic cables that were portrayed by the Obama administration as damaging to the US, but in reality embarrassed US diplomats who wrote candidly about the behavior of foreign leaders in their reports back home.