Free Press?

You cannot hope 

to bribe or twist, 

thank God! the 

British journalist.

But seeing what 

the man will do 

unbribed, there’s 

no occasion to.

Humbert Wolfe.

The silence of the UK media and its journalists is striking when it comes to reporting and supporting freedom of speech in the political trial or as the court prefers to call it - an extradition hearing - of Julian Assange so to face prosecution in the USA under the Espionage Act. The charges all relate to the release of government secrets, the sort of thing that all journalists should aspire to do,

The extradition treaty's Article 4 stipulates that, “Extradition shall not be granted if the offense for which the extradition is requested is a political offense.”  

The team representing the US government suggested that the judge have recourse to substantive UK domestic law, not the Treaty itself.  Whether Assange was wanted for political reasons or not was irrelevant as he was “not entitled to derive any rights from the [US-UK Extradition] Treaty”. The prosecution effectively relied on a peculiarity of the Westminster system: the Treaty, ratified in 2007, had not been incorporated into UK domestic law.  That domestic law can be found in the Extradition Act 2003, which does not feature political offenses as a bar to extradition.  “There’s no such thing as a political offense in ordinary English law”, something that only arose in the context of extradition.

WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson reminded us that this is “journalism on trial” and stated that the US argument is repeating the same old line they used 10 years ago, while dismissing the importance of the harm the US was doing, as revealed WikiLeaks by in their 2010-2011 publications. Hrafnsson rejected the US government’s claims that WikiLeaks publications put lives at risk, stating that during the 2013 Manning Trial, the US government could not prove any harm, and had to admit that no physical harm had occurred to a single individual due to WikiLeaks revelations.

Rather than prosecute those who committed war crimes as revealed in the data released, it is the messenger who is placed in the dock. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) UK bureau director Rebecca Vincent noted, that Assange, “ has been targeted for his contributions to public interest reporting.”