Appearing in public for the first time since he returned in June to Australia from Britain’s Belmarsh Prison, Julian Assange will give his first official testimony since 2019 on 1 October.
He’s been invited to address a Legal and Human Rights Committee at the Palace of Europe in Strasbourg. The Committee’s chairwoman, Sunna Ævarsdóttir, has reported that Assange’s case is a high-profile example of transnational repression, and his status as a political prisoner has been confirmed. More broadly, Ævarsdóttir’s report now accuses governments of employing both legal and extralegal measures to repress dissent across borders, significantly threatening media freedom and human rights beyond their own territories.
Consortium News YouTube, September 27, 2024
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe is expected to call for an independent review in the UK of the inhuman and degrading treatment Assange received. Britain is seen as having failed to protect Assange’s freedom of expression and his right to liberty. The Parliamentary Assembly’s 2012 definition of a political prisoner applies to Assange in view of the severe charges and penalties which he faced. When a UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, reported in 2019 that this amounted to torture, it was ignored in London.
The US is an observer state in the Council of Europe. Its next step is likely to be a call for the US president to give Assange a pardon. President Barack Obama commuted the sentence for Chelsea Manning, the US army soldier who gave Assange masses of classified US documents in 2010, after she had served seven years. Although President Donald Trump proposed a plea-bargain, Assange remained the enemy of many military, political, and media organisations and individuals who wanted him extradited to face “justice”.
With collusion from the UK, Assange was imprisoned for five years after already spending seven years in diplomatic asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador. A long drawn out legal process ended in June after Britain’s High Court allowed him to appeal again against extradition to the US on 17 charges of espionage and one of conspiracy, which together would see him sentenced to 175 years in jail. The US dropped the multiple espionage charges in exchange for Assange pleading guilty to collusion – that is, having conspired with Manning to “obtain and disclose national defence information”. The deal allowed Assange’s immediate release, with a discount of five years’ time served for his breach of bail in the UK. He returned to Australia in June and has since been in seclusion with his family.
No evidence was produced of WikiLeaks’ disclosures harming anyone — informants, intelligence sources, or under cover personnel — despite frequent claims that they had done so. Rather, reliable reports emerged of the CIA plotting to kill him, and commissioning a Spanish company to monitor his every move in the Embassy of Ecuador, from which exultant British police eventually removed him.
Greg Barns SC, a legal adviser to the Australian Assange campaign, said it was the politics that made it possible to get Assange out of Belmarsh Prison: ‘The Albanese Government was the first to elevate the matter with the US. And Albanese got support from the opposition.” Stephen Smith and Kevin Rudd, Australia’s top diplomats in London and Washington, used their influence, as did Ambassador Caroline Kennedy in Canberra. A bipartisan group of parliamentarians took up his case in London and Washington.
Assange’s testimony to the Council of Europe will lend support to calls on the US urgently to reform its 1917 Espionage Act and remove its future application to publishers, journalists, and whistleblowers who receive secret information and reveal it in the public interest. A campaign for this is being waged by a Democrat from Michigan, Rashida Tlaib (the first Palestinian woman in Congress and one of the first two Muslim congresswomen).
Tlaib, a lawyer, recalls that the Espionage Act was used in many failed cases aimed at criminalising whistleblowers during the Vietnam war, and later those who revealed the US practice of mass surveillance, torture, drone assassinations, and war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Interestingly, she includes revealing Israel’s intelligence operations as another activity against which the Act has been used, though also without success.
Reforms proposed by Tlaib include introducing new twin defences of public interest and having no harmful intent against the US. Defendants against espionage charges must be allowed to testify about the purposes of their disclosure. In the age of social media — not contemplated in 1917 when the Espionage Act was passed to deter conscientious objectors — another amendment would ensure that it does not apply to the ordinary public sharing of articles and comments. Tlaib argues that the legal obligation to protect secret material should apply only to government employees or contractors and to properly classified documents. But as well, it would deal with foreign agents in the US and “members of international terrorist groups”.
If Tlaib’s reforms gain support, Congress may try to spell out who is regarded as a foreign agent, and the criteria by which they and “terrorist groups” are defined. With her Palestinian background, she is likely to have a view about what constitutes terrorism in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. Even if she accepts that Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organisations, they may seem to her to be waging war against a terrorist state.
Dr Alison Broinowski AM is a former Australian diplomat and a member of Australians fr War Powers Reform
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