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Julian Assange granted permission to appeal against extradition to US
- e12e 3y ago> Judges grant WikiLeaks founder permission to appeal against removal from UK but only if UK and US are unable to provide suitable assurances
- popol12 3y ago> the assurances would need to include “that the applicant (Assange) is permitted to rely on the first amendment, that the applicant is not prejudiced at trial, including sentence, by reason of his nationality, that he is afforded the same first amendment protections as a United States citizen, and that the death penalty is not imposed”. I wonder what would happen if the US gave these assurances then broke them ? Also, what kind of sentence would Julian face even if he get these assurances ? Could it be anything lower than life in jail ?
- alexey-salmin 3y agoThey can also easily give him a life sentence while claiming to maintain the "assurances"
- gruez 3y agoThat's... exactly what I expect given the assurance given? I'm not sure why there's any implication that the uk meant something else.
- zarzavat 3y agoThen the US would not be able to extradite anyone from a country that requires assurances ever again. Given that the US still has the death penalty for many crimes this would cripple its ability to extradite.
- alexey-salmin 3y agoWell that's unlikely to happen, US have enough leverage to extradite anyone they want
- bakuninsbart 3y agoYeah, once you start kidnapping your allies citizens openly, a lot less goodwill will be returned. And the US isn't powerful enough to just bully the rest of the world without repercussions.
- throwaway3839 3y agoAnymore?
- edgyquant 3y agoAgain, it isn’t about goodwill. The US totally dominates these countries and its times like this where its citizens really see that.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xandrius 3y agoYou'd think so and yet the rest of the world is what gives US its edge. Without it, they are to lose more than they win with Assange.
- danpalmer 3y ago> US have enough leverage to extradite anyone they want I thought that was the case but I think Assange proves that's not as strong as many expected. I think it was reasonable to expect him being extradited 10 years ago, it's surprising he hasn't been yet. What I do think the US achieved was pressuring the UK into not extraditing him to Sweden. He was charged with crimes there that seemed much more clear cut – not espionage, just a regular case that anyone else would be extradited for. Whether you think that was a conspiracy or not, in isolation it was a justified extradition with no safety concerns, so the US clearly has some sway in preventing it.
- objclxt 3y ago> I wonder what would happen if the US gave these assurances then broke them ? The English courts are permitted to take into account whether assurances for previous extraditions have been complied with: > When considering the adequacy of an assurance in any particular case, the courts should place appropriate weight on any assurance previously obtained in extradition requests from the same requesting country. http://data.parliament.uk/DepositedPapers/Files/DEP2016-0191/2016-1-20_Assurances_Review.pdf http://data.parliament.uk/DepositedPapers/Files/DEP2016-0191... ...this is of little comfort to Assange, but it does mean that there is an incentive for the country issuing the assurances to comply with them, otherwise their future extradition requests have a greatly increased chance of being denied.
- master-lincoln 3y agonothing, apart from some officials expressing disappointment
- Tomte 3y ago> I wonder what would happen if the US gave these assurances then broke them ? Regarding the death penalty part: extraditions from Germany (and probably all of Europe) would immediately stop in capital cases. Those all rely on American assurances, and the first time it's broken, courts will disregard them for a long time.
- roenxi 3y ago"Would" is a strong word. "Might" seems a bit more reasonable. There is currently an escalating war in Europe and Germany has already rolled over and accepted the Nord Stream pipe as an act of God. Well, I don't actually know where their investigation is up to, but they're not acting like their infrastructure was attacked by a military. They're just taking it on the chin, probably some strongly worded diplomatic protests. If that was a pipeline heading in to the continental US a country would have been removed from the map by now. With that so large in the rear view mirror, are they really in a position to start defying the US on extraditions? The US will claim this is a special case and Germany will probably go with it in practice.
- tim333 3y ago>If that was a pipeline heading in to the continental US a country would have been removed from the map by now The problem is which country? No one seems to know who did it.
- flerchin 3y agoHuh, I always figured it was the Germans themselves that blew it up. To remove the blackmail angle.
- roenxi 3y agoThat is the most outrageous theory I've ever heard on the subject. I don't believe it but I do like the audacity of it.
- simiones 3y agoProbably the Germans and the Russians working together, I would say. Makes the most sense, after all, what losing the billions they invested together in building it would hurt everyone else the most, right?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- skilled 3y ago> Julian Assange may still be extradited to the US in three weeks if US Gov provides "assurances" - previously deemed by Amnesty as "inherently unreliable" - including that he will not be prejudiced at trial by reason of his nationality and not receive the death penalty https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1772585710903558200 https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1772585710903558200
- andrewstuart 3y agoTotally unenforceable assurances from the USA mean nothing. Assange should be brought back to Australia.
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoSuccessive Australian governments have been remiss in their, sometimes total, lack of involvement in Assange's plight. It shows how much Australian politicians and politics kowtow to the US. It's shameful.
- phyalow 3y agoAgreed the historical record is terrible. However the tide is turning recently under the Albenese Govt. https://www.reuters.com/world/australia-pm-backs-parliament-motion-calling-julian-assanges-release-2024-02-14 https://www.reuters.com/world/australia-pm-backs-parliament-...
- marcus_holmes 3y agoIt is shameful, and we should be holding the c*nts to account for it.
- Malidir 3y ago[flagged]
- prmoustache 3y agoI still don't understand how a country can grant extradition of a non US citizen to the USA for "espionage". Every country is potentially spying on every other country and it doesn't even matter if they are supposed to be allies or enemies. The only limits are resources.
- M95D 3y agoI guess it depends on what's written in the treaty.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoWhat would the alternative be? Expats can commit cyber crimes risk-free? Just don't be a citizen of the country you reside in or the country you're attacking and you're immune! They can extradite him because Australia says that they can. Most of our countries at the highest levels agreed to this. It's called international law and it's messy.
- eastbound 3y ago> Expats can commit cyber crimes risk-free? Not an expat. Julian Assange is not a US citizen, not on US ground, does not work for a US company. He can’t be committing “espionage” because he’s not inside; at most he can be committing “reporting” upon US practices. Same question arose when EU wrote the GDPR: It was a debate at the time that a US company with no activity in EU could be trialled in EU for misdemeanor against EU laws. Apparently it can.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoHow is he not an expat of Australia?
- saalweachter 3y agoOnly Americans get to be expats, everyone else has to be immigrants.
- juitpykyk 3y agoRussia foreign minister (Zaharova) continuously asks for Assange to be released, mentioning "freedom of speech". Assange has building size graffiti murals in Moscow.
- vbezhenar 3y agoZaharova is director of the Information and Press Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Lavrov is foreign minister.
- FpUser 3y agoWhat does this have anything to do with the extradition case?
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoIt's a bit rich to be lectured by Russia on freedom of speech. Word to Russia: "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye." (Matthew 7:3-5, English Standard Version.) I mean, look, the US should be judged for how it upholds its own values, and it does so less than perfectly. It justly deserves condemnation for when and where it falls short of its own stated values. But Russia... does Russia really want countries to be judged by freedom of speech?
- ledoge 3y agoCourt documents can be found here: https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/assange-v-government-of-the-united-states-of-america-3/ https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/assange-v-government-of-t... Paragraph 210 of the judgment argues why the US's kidnapping/assassination plot is not a valid ground for refusing the extradition: > [...] On the face of the allegations (on the evidence before the judge and the fresh evidence) the contemplation of extreme measures against the applicant (whether poisoning for example or rendition) were a response to the fear that the applicant might flee to Russia. The short answer to this, is that the rationale for such conduct is removed if the applicant is extradited. Extradition would result in him being lawfully in the custody of the United States authorities, and the reasons (if they can be called that) for rendition or kidnap or assassination then fall away.
- FpUser 3y ago[flagged]
- SkeuomorphicBee 3y agoWhat an utterly absurd judgment, that should have no place on a free society. They have a literal kidnapping/assassination plot, and yet the Judge considers it all above board and that it doesn't show any prejudice.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago[flagged]
- lll-o-lll 3y ago> It is absurd, he should be on a flight right now. For the crime of reporting information that embarrassed the US government.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
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- partitioned 3y agoI saw that they were considering giving him a plea deal. If the Biden admins give Assange a plea deal similar to Manning it will be a good thing because the crimes were similar and motivated similarly.
- Kenji 3y ago[dead]
- derelicta 3y agoWhat a catastrophe. This is the ultimate evidence that there is no such thing as a free press; People are only allowed to report what their masters allow them to. The day you cross a line and in Assange's case, the day you report the crimes commited by The Empire, they crush you.
- mnau 3y agoInsert "Always has been" meme.
- vaylian 3y agoDoesn't mean that it always has to stay that way.
- mnau 3y agoPeople tried and kind-of succeeded. It's being eroded, but it still mostly works. US generally doesn't persecute it's citizens for reporting. See Pentagon papers. Assange is not US citizen. Guantanamo bay detainees weren't US citizens. They are free targets.
- JTbane 3y agoagreed, IMO both he and Snowden should have been pardoned as whistleblowers...
- tim333 3y ago
- tptacek 3y agoIt's becoming increasingly pointless for the US and UK to litigate this as the time Assange spends in formal custody accrues, mooting any likely potential sentence he'd receive in the US. The WSJ has Assange close to a plea deal that would avoid US custody altogether.
- e12e 3y agoYou think he'll spend 175 years in UK prison?
- tptacek 3y agoNo.
- ImHereToVote 3y ago[flagged]
- tptacek 3y agoIn what sense does Habeas apply here? Habeas isn't a right not to face prosecution, and Assange is incarcerated because he refuses to surrender himself to (two different) courts, not because he hasn't been charged.
- ImHereToVote 3y agoHabeas corpus guarantees a right to a speedy trial. No habeas corpus no speedy trial.
- tptacek 3y agoThe reason his trial hasn't been speedy is that he's refused to allow it to proceed! Which, fair enough, but you can't make a Habeas claim to escape charges when you succeed in stalling proceedings.
- bondarchuk 3y ago
- hnbad 3y agoGiven that the US is not a signatory to several international treaties and regularly employs solitary confinement, which is internationally considered as a form of torture, there is a humanitarian argument against the extradition. The desire to comply with the extradition request seems to be more about politics (i.e. maintaining good relationships with the US) than the rule of law. The treatment of Manning should be sufficient evidence to deny the claim that Assange would receive a fair trial and treatment as a prisoner that is compatible with human rights (i.e. that excludes torture). But given that the judgement argues that even the plans to assassinate him were justified, I doubt this will be given any consideration.
- edgyquant 3y ago[flagged]
- Lord-Jobo 3y agoAs a broad methodology it isn't torture per say, sure. But the implementation in the vast majority of our justice systems 100% no question is aggregious torture. Digestible source: last week tonight: https://youtu.be/_uSZwErdH3I?si=DfHkVDbGegVt06tJ https://youtu.be/_uSZwErdH3I?si=DfHkVDbGegVt06tJ More detailed source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/30/hellhole https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/30/hellhole
- Cheer2171 3y agoYou have no understanding of prisons.
- southernplaces7 3y agoIt would be interesting to see you or anyone with your opinion about solitary spend even six months in U.S. Federal/state supermax levels of isolation and then emerge to say with a straight face and sound mind that it isn't torture. Humans are innately social animals, and isolating them against their will from virtually all human contact even for fairly short periods of time can be more destructive to their being than physically mutilating them, even if the scars won't be so visible. Whether such a punishment is justified for some types of extreme criminals or not is another argument that we could debate, but let's at least be honest about describing it for the cruelty it is as a method. Total supermax-type solitary is one very major reason why even some of the wold's hardest criminals in other countries fight extradition to the U.S at all costs. Should someone like Assange be placed at the same moral level as a mass murdering Mexican narco boss?
- polski-g 3y agoI don't know why this is taking so long or why he's fighting it. He will easily win this case citing New York Times Company v. United States as the precedent. A publisher is allowed to publish state secrets if they aren't the ones who originally obtained them.
- _fizz_buzz_ 3y agoI thought that was his problem. The US prosecution says that he instructed and assisted Manning in obtaining the documents.
- polski-g 3y agoThat would explain things.
- marcus_holmes 3y agoThey will deny that he is a journalist or publisher. A lot of journalists are on record as agreeing with that - he's "just a blogger". The UK has defined journalism as "working for a mainstream media organisation" (I paraphrase). The US govt will argue that none of the journalism precedents apply.
- bitcharmer 3y ago> He will easily win this case You can't get any more naive than that :)
- andrewla 3y agoAs someone who wants to see Assange go free, I continue to believe the best outcome here is for him to be extradited and face trial in the US. I do not think the government's case is strong enough to convict him, and his being acquitted at trial would be by far the best outcome possible here. The fact that he has been imprisoned in the UK without trial or conviction for the last four years is insane (he has been imprisoned for 5 years but the first year was for a bail violation). This should simply not be possible in a modern liberal democracy. This is the best possible outcome from the standpoint of the US national security machine -- that he remains imprisoned indefinitely while waiting on a Kafka-esque system to finally grind him to mush, and serves as a dire warning to other journalists who would defy them.
- kome 3y ago"I do not think the government's case is strong enough to convict him" wow, you really trust American institutions. but most of the people doesn't and for good reasons.
- Loughla 3y agoHonestly, do you believe he would receive a fair and impartial trial in the united states?
- andrewla 3y agoFrom your question, I take it that you do not believe this is possible. I certainly do. It might be worth further interrogating why you believe that he would not get a fair and impartial trial. That said, I don't believe that a fair and impartial trail will guarantee an acquittal. But although the national security apparatus is arrayed against him, there's still a judge and a jury and a trial -- this will not be a military tribunal. The closest comparisons to his situation would be Ellsberg, and less like Manning or Winner, both of whom were employees of the US government. Ellsberg's case was dismissed, and Winer pled guilty; only Manning was convicted at trial. Being extradited would also be his best chance of being free on bail during trial, although this outcome, despite representing his best chance, is not very likely.
- bsjaux628 3y ago[flagged]
- ametrau 3y ago> let's no forget he is also a Russian asset No one with half a brain believes that. Please try harder.
- illithid0 3y agoWhile there are bits of truth in this comment, much of it is exaggerated and unsubstantiated, namely: - Being a verified Russian asset - Working with Russia to specifically help elect Trump to the office of president - Specifically seeking to weaken US democracy Going to need sources and supporting evidence proportionate to the extent of your claims.
- aodonnell2536 3y agoWhich bits are true?
- illithid0 3y agoCame back to answer but the comment got flagged, but I think I remember it being that he chose not to publish RNC info received at roughly the same time as the DNC emails. That said, I just fact-checked myself and found that the RNC stuff was already public and that was Assange's reason for not publishing. So I'm not sure anything in the comment I was replying to can be substantiated.
- mypastself 3y agoPerhaps they aren’t pressing those charges precisely because they believe they wouldn’t have a strong case, then.
- southernplaces7 3y ago>and worked with them to help Trump become president and weaken US democracy by releasing the Clinton emails when he was ordered. This has become such a tedious point of hate against Assange, and all the more so because it's so badly unfounded, much like the absurdly time-consuming and costly hullabaloo about Trump himself becoming president due to "collusion" with Russia. I suppose the several dozen million people who voted for Trump in the U.S. just can't be viewed as anything more than brainless peons who couldn't have possibly had any sort of personal motive for doing so? They were all brainwashed? Unlike the enlightened voters for the other side? That the NY Times and other socially elite media organizations couldn't get over the simple truth of so many people that they ignored in turn ignoring these media organizations' supposedly enlightened pronouncements is one thing. That so many other ordinary progressives can't stand the idea is a bit more absurd. If you need to sink to the level of promoting conspiracy theories, supporting grotesque miscarriages of legal procedure and actively applauding the suppression of evidence inconvenient to your preferred side of the spectrum, you've lost intellectual credibility.
- em1sar 3y ago[dead]
- dhx 3y agoThe charges currently listed are not going to age well in history books due to reasons such as: 1. Other parties are seemingly more responsible than Assange in releasing of unredacted cables, and yet these parties are seemingly not subject to repercussions. For example, the journalists who published in a book a password they had been given to decrypt an archive of unredacted cables.[1, 2] The Wikileaks volunteer who without Assange's permission provided unredacted cables to a different journalist.[3] Other parties who published the unredacted cables before Wikileaks did, using the password leaked by the journalists.[1] 2. In Manning's sentencing, a court was told by the US government that no reprisals were known to have occurred to Afghan civilians helping the US as a result of the Afghan War Logs leak.[3] By contrast there are publicly reported instances of Afghans who helped the US during the war being left behind and then beheaded [5] and tortured [6] by the Taliban. Coalition partners (UK, AU, etc) were not at all happy about this Afghanistan exit! The UK requiring a specialty assurance seemingly forces the US to forfeit additional charges secretly sought to be added, for example, charges for Vault 7 leaks. And even if Assange was extradited to the US, the US has provided the UK with assurance that he'd be sent back over to Australia where "Free Assange" graffiti is everywhere and Assange is possibly the only issue that the Greens and National parties will ever agree upon.[7] Picture Trump and Biden traveling together and lobbying together in the same room for the same cause. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cables_leak#September_2011_release_of_mostly_unredacted_cables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cable... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks:_Inside_Julian_Assange%27s_War_on_Secrecy#Publication_of_the_password https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks:_Inside_Julian_Assan... [3] https://www.wired.com/2011/09/unauthorized-assange-memoir/ https://www.wired.com/2011/09/unauthorized-assange-memoir/ [4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/bradley-manning-sentencing-hearing-pentagon https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/bradley-mannin... [5] https://nypost.com/2021/07/24/translator-who-worked-for-us-army-beheaded-by-taliban-report/ https://nypost.com/2021/07/24/translator-who-worked-for-us-a... [6] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/afghanistan-interpreter-taliban-torture-us-denies-special-immigration-visa/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/afghanistan-interpreter-taliban... [7] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/05/australian-mps-to-lobby-us-to-drop-julian-assange-prosecution-or-risk-very-dangerous-precedent-for-russia-and-china https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/05/austr...
- EasyMark 3y agoThis is really good news and a win for independent journalism. I support my government in most things but definitely not in persecuting journalists.
- gverri 3y agoCan anyone more familiar with the case tell me if they already released proof that he was actively collaborating/instructing to obtain illegal material?