Julian Assange’s Release: Legal and Civil Liberty Implications

Author: Ian Aldridge, Progressive Legal

Julian Assange’s release last week was a big milestone for civil libertarians and whistleblowers.

Whatever you think of him, here are some points to consider from a legal perspective:

1. Assange was never an American citizen;

2. He was facing extradition for charges under US laws relating to espionage and the US was extremely keen to extradite him to be able to try him in the USA, where he would have most certainly have suffered a fate at least similar to Private Manning;

3. From 2012, he spent 7 years in the Ecuadorial consulate in London effectively imprisoned so that the US couldn’t extradite him;

4. All allegations of sexual assault which were raised while he was in asylum were eventually dropped by Swedish prosecution;

5. He was then arrested for breaching Bail conditions (by going into the consulate in the first place), he was then sentenced to 50 weeks in Belmarsh Prison (one of the hardest) in the UK and was there from 2019;

6. He finally reached an agreement with the US authorities and plead guilty to conspiring to obtain and disclose classified U.S. documents in order to secure his release from prison and not to have to face extradition to the USA. i.e. he bargained and had to give the US something in order to secure his release. They got at least a conviction against him;

7. There has been significant debate about whether in fact he should have been pardoned a long time ago, even whether he should have faced charges in the first place;

8. If Private Manning had not provided this information and videos to Wikileaks and them publishing them, we (the people) would probably never have found out about these atrocious war-crimes and murder being committed.

9. If Snowden hadn’t done the same, we would have never have found out about Operation Prizm and that the “Patriot Act” was being used to spy on all US citizens, which outraged the US public when it was found out and certainly not what the Law was intended to be used for.

10. What they did to Private Manning was inhumane. Even the UN torture chief ruled that the treatment of him was cruel and inhuman! He was initially held for almost 3 months at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, and then transferred in July 2010 to the Marine corps base at Quantico in Virginia. He was held there for another 8 months in conditions that aroused widespread condemnation, including being held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day lights on and being made to strip naked at night. The whole of this time – he was held without charge! From a legal perspective, this is fundamentally abhorrent.

11. The amount of documents that were published were approximately 1 in 5, so it’s false to suggest that Wikileaks didn’t vet the documents prior to publishing. The only real issue was the non-redaction of spies abroad, which I’m sure in hindsight he would have done, but even so, there is not a skerrick of evidence to suggest that any of those spies or any of their family harmed.