June Washington Memo
A win for Assange - but we shouldn’t have to depend on a foreign government’s court system to stop our government from killing off the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedom.
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On May 20, 2024, I was at the Royal Courts of Justice in London when the UK High Court gave Julian Assange his first legal victory in four years. I will confess, I was pleasantly surprised by the news. I was certain that the High Court was prepared to rubber stamp the US’s persecution of the WikiLeaks publisher. Nonetheless, Assange – and the future of press freedom – is not out of danger yet.
In the UK legal system, one needs permission to appeal. In February of this year, the same two judges held two days of hearings about whether Assange could appeal his extradition to the US on nine separate grounds. While the defense presented the arguments in some detail and UK attorneys representing the US gave their rebuttal, the goal of the hearing was to determine if there are arguable points for an appeal. The judges rejected most of the potential grounds for appeal, including that the US’s extradition request violated Assange’s right to free expression by prosecuting him as a journalist for exposing war crimes. The judges also found that a provision in the US-UK extradition treaty prohibiting extradition for political offenses – perhaps Assange's strongest argument against extradition – was not enforceable by the judiciary. Disturbingly, the judges blocked Assange’s defense from preventing additional evidence about the CIA’s plot to kill him. The judges reasoned they already had convincing evidence of this subject, but if Assange is extradited to the US, the CIA loses its impetus to assassinate the journalist.