Assange case: they could not kill the messenger | To write …

I don’t know if the name of Vanessa Baraitser, magistrate of the Central Criminal Court of London, will go down in the history of international criminal law or that of the extraditions of her country, but the decision she rendered on Monday will mark a before and after in her career, at deny the surrender of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, in the United States of America. This is what happened, as precedent, with the judge Ronald bartle when he granted the extradition of Augusto Pinochet in 1999.

It is true that he could have, and perhaps should have, opted for a more forceful decision, clearly putting the defense of freedom of expression as the driving force behind its condemnation, but he chose to move on to the less complicated variable of British justice, still as balanced and politically correct; that is to say for humanitarian reasons.

By rejecting the extradition of Julian Assange as requested by the United States, he favored a collective sigh of relief. The judge came to resolve what we have revealed so many times from the team of defenders that I coordinate: Julian Assange’s health has suffered an obvious deterioration, the result of so many years of confinement and the constant harassment he has suffered. suffered during this long period of siege. “The risk of Assange committing suicide, if extradition was allowed, was high,” says Baraitser. “Mr. Assange’s mental health is in such a bad state that it would be overwhelming for him to be extradited to the United States.”

For sure. I saw with my own eyes how the journalist and founder of WikiLeaks was treated inhumanely by powerful and omnipresent forces which have by all means tried to silence it, neutralize it and put an end to it. They did not succeed. It is David’s fight against Goliath that we have undertaken to fight impunity in the United States, since on June 19, 2012, Julian was isolated at the Ecuadorian embassy in London to seek asylum, which was granted to him by the government. of President Rafael Correa, courageous in the face of the imposing North American administration. We risked freedom of expression, freedom of information and, above all, the right of citizens to know who manipulate the ropes that move the world, what they don’t want us to know and where they intend to lead us. In other words, the very essence of democracy was at stake.

Assange stood up

Julian Assange stood up and paid for it. They accused him of committing 18 crimes, including 17 under the 1917 Espionage Act – you know what time we’re talking about – and one related to alleged computer aid to the military. Chelsea manning, which the United States claims was the source of WikiLeaks. The 175 years in prison they claim has to do with the publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan war diaries in 2010, the Guantanamo Bay files and the State Department cables. What Assange revealed was the commission of different crimes by North American authorities: war crimes, torture and various international crimes.

He has lived through a real ordeal since then. This was underlined by the UN rapporteur against torture, Nils melzer. As well as the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions and the Rapporteur on Health of the same Organization, with repeated and convincing reports. In addition, the treatment received in Belmarsh High Security Prison since his expulsion from the embassy in April 2018, has led to the judicial conviction that any proceedings followed against him leading to a conviction, that would be cruel and could lead to certain death.

This resolution highlights the disproportion of possible sanctions and the doubts that the North American prison system, in particular in times of pandemic, raises in the magistrate and that in its resolution we read the apparent contradiction of asserting that the process would be fair in the complaining country, but that the The execution of the sentence would not be, as this could irreversibly lead to the death of the affected subject. This statement is more serious if it is possible to have clearly stated that the persecution of Julian Assange was political and repressive of the right to free speech, as it really is from a defense point of view. The sentence, finally, disqualifies the entire North American prison system, as the same UK judge did just two years ago in the case Lauri Love, by Anonymous, by refusing, for the same reason, his extradition to the United States in February 2018.

Seven years of forcible confinement and harassment

The solidarity and loyalty of President Correa prevented Assange from being handed over to Sweden by taking refuge at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. a dark charge that deflated over time without charges being laid and it was shut down without evidence, but it raised strong suspicion that it had all been a strategy to bring about his extradition to the United States. It was the game.

He spent seven years at the Embassy, ​​in a room with no sun, no fresh air, suffering from all kinds of physical and psychological ailments. Being spied on constantly. The change of government in Ecuador with the coming to power of a president, Lenin Moreno, submissive to the United States, led to the expulsion from the embassy and entry into a high security prison that threatened to end up destroying the fragile state of the journalist. On my last visit to this prison, when we said goodbye, through tears, with a long hug, I truly feared for his life and doubted that justice in Julian Assange’s case could be calibrated as such, while none of the serious events denounced for him, he had been investigated by the country which had asked him to silence him.

In this confrontation, the harassment spread to those around him. His lawyers have also been spied on by the Spanish security company (UC Global) present at the Ecuadorian embassy and allegedly linked to the North American intelligence services, an end which is the subject of an investigation before the central investigative court number five of the Spanish National Court. Of such vigilance even the baby did not get rid of, son of Assange, whose life – even in such minimalist terms – has been comprehensively reviewed and analyzed.

Kill the messenger

The great sin the journalist committed was, without a doubt, found WikiLeaks, the news agency which set up a firewall system on IP so that everything Alert launcher the world could send on this platform information relating to the commission of crimes. The source was anonymous. Years later, a European directive on these whistleblowers was proposed in the same terms.

Killing the messenger has always been the resource of the wicked, criminals, those who do not know how to hide the evil that they possess. Silence is the medicine which they forcefully apply in the belief that in this way their sins will not see the light. Sometimes they are successful, but in this case the game did not go well. Assange was not alone, there were hundreds of thousands of voices calling for freedom for the journalist around the world. While it is also true that there has been a lot of official silence and unacceptable personal disqualifications. But in the end, and for now, while waiting for the call more than likely, justice was served at a key moment, when Donald Trump, enraged by his status as incumbent president, gives his final blows by applying a heavy hand on all these questions that he can solve with his style in the few – and long days – that remain for the presidential relay. I don’t want to think about what the extradition of Assange would have involved in these circumstances.

I think the best summary is Noam chomsky, whose testimony we read during the trial before the British magistrate. For the philosopher, Assange lent a huge service to freedom of expression and democracy. “The US government seeks to criminalize him for exposing a power that could evaporate if the people seize the opportunity to become independent citizens of a free society, rather than subjects of a master who operates in secret.” It is the glory of Assange and America’s misery. Today the messenger is still alive. And we, his lawyers, will continue to defend that he has fulfilled, neither more nor less, his duty as a journalist for the benefit of all.

* This note was originally published on the Spanish site infoLibre. Baltasar Garzón is Julian Assange’s defense coordinator.