Free: the judgment in favor of Julian Assange | Opinion

Silence came first. Julian Assange, held in a top security prison in Britain, appeared at court hearings locked in a bulletproof glass cage and no one seemed to be getting much attention. He had revealed the darkest secrets of the United States and its associated allies to the most powerful and prestigious media in the world and now these media were silent as the United States and Britain had life, la freedom, health and reputation of the publisher. series of uncomfortable truths, turned into last generation terrorist. Alone, isolated and at the mercy of his enemies, Assange faces an extradition to the United States that appears to be a simple process, more or less prolonged.

But things happened, starting with Donald Trump’s electoral derrota. The main persecutor of the founder of WikiLeaks and ideologue of the accusation for which Assange would get up to 175 years in prison will be replaced on January 20 at the White House by Joe Biden, the double vice-president of Barack Obama. And it turns out that during Obama’s presidency, Attorney General Eric Holder refused to prosecute Assange because, according to his reasoning, he could not prosecute him without also bringing his editorial partners in the United States to justice, starting with him. New York Times, and without violating the United States’ First Constitutional Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech in this country. It should be noted that in the United States, the judiciary is not an independent power of the executive, but rather the Attorney General acts as the Minister of Justice and is part of the Presidential Cabinet. A staunch supporter of the Obama administration, for Biden, Assange’s possible trial in the United States has become a problem.

The decision of Judge Vanessa Baraister the refusal of extradition on mental health grounds occurs in this context. The British magistrate bases her refusal on the risk of suicide that Assange presents due to a worsening depression after 10 years of detention, seven at the Ecuadorian embassy in London and three in British prisons. But he rejects the other arguments of the defense, in particular that it is a political cause and therefore not extraditable. Assange is on trial for an alleged “conspiracy” with his source, Chelsea manning, to obtain and publish on WikiLeaks and with its partners – dozens of outlets around the world, including Page 12– millions of diplomatic documents, from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and from the Guantanamo prison, extracted from an American security network.

Baraister’s decision is surprising. There is hardly any specific record of British justice refusing extradition to the United States not only because of the political proximity between the two countries, in particular its military and intelligence chiefs, but because the Treaty of extradition between the two countries is as flexible as possible. it has been approved all over the world. But the judge’s decision is not without logic.

This leaves the door open for the process to continue with appeals, but also gives the Biden government a gracious exit so he can avoid a difficult trial at home without stepping out of his characterization of Assange as a “top terrorist.” technology ”and without confronting the intelligence community which for years claimed the head of the Australian publisher. Which for Trump was an unavoidable request, as Biden Biden became an issue the judge avoided.

From a political point of view it is a failure to compromise but on another level it is still a clear triumph for democracy and free speech. From a humanitarian point of view, the most important thing is that the judicial decision allows Assange to regain his freedom after a decade of confinement aggravated by all kinds of trespass, extortion, deprivation, ill-treatment and psychological torture. At a minimum, upon exiting, the WikiLeaks publisher will be able to use his recovered mental faculties to collaborate with his own legal defense and relaunch his leak portal with new revelations. Moreover, this failure allows him to find his family and their affections and to regain his happiness and his will to live. AND In this way, you can continue to inspire whistleblowers or potential whistleblowers to continue presenting evidence of opaque, immoral and criminal proceedings from the large private and public companies that rule the world. That is why it is not just another decision and is not limited to the health of the accused. In a case that involves the freedom, not only of expression, of global society, nothing less, no decision is innocent.