UK court approves Assange extradition appeal
Washington, D.C., May 20, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes the U.K. High Court’s Monday decision to allow WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to appeal his extradition case.
“We are heartened that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will be allowed to appeal his extradition to the United States,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg, in New York. “Assange’s prosecution in the United States would have disastrous implications for press freedom. It is time for the United States Department of Justice to drop its harmful charges against Assange.”
If extradited and convicted in the U.S., Assange’s lawyers have said that he faces up to 175 years in prison under the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, although U.S. prosecutors have said the sentence would be much shorter. Last week, CPJ and partners sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland urging the Justice Department to drop charges against the Wikileaks founder.
Alan Rusbridger: Why Julian Assange’s fate matters
Who knows how Assange will be seen in a generation’s time, but his cause is one that should galvanize journalists in support — if only because the significance of the Pentagon Papers case could so easily be reversed.
Imagine this. A determined American journalist, let’s call her Gillian, is sleuthing away at a story about India’s nuclear weapons program. But there’s a problem: the Indian Official Secrets Act of 1923. Though Gillian is based in London, when she finally gets to publish her story, the Indian government is bent on revenge. Gillian has to be made an example of, so that no other journalist would dare follow in her footsteps. So, the Indian government applies for her to be extradited to stand trial in Delhi. She faces up to 10 years in jail. Is London going to hand Gillian over? Is Washington going to stand idly by and meekly accept the possibility of an American journalist languishing in an Indian jail?
Dream on. It would never happen. There would be a global howl of rage from journalists. And the UK and US governments would quietly make sure the whole thing went away.
Now, forget Gillian and think about Julian. He’s an Australian “journalist” living in London. Only it’s not Indian state secrets he’s intent on spilling: it’s American ones. The Americans are — at least after a while — furious and threaten to extradite and jail him. But, with Julian, there’s no howl of rage, just a mumble of vague disapproval. The clue is in the inverted commas around “journalist.” To my mind, Julian Assange is in some ways recognizably a journalist. He’s also a publisher, an entrepreneur, an activist, a whistleblower, an information anarchist and a hacker. That’s true of many of this new breed of net warriors.
But in the work we did together when I was editor of The Guardian and he was editor of WikiLeaks we collaborated on a series of groundbreaking stories which were absolutely journalistic. However, to many journalists Assange is not a proper “journalist,” and they can’t really see what his fate has to do with theirs. I think that’s a mistake….
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Committee to Protect Journalists – Defending Journalists …
After the truth-shower 