Last Chance to Save Assange and Safeguard Press Freedom

(Statement by Dominique Pradalié,  President of the International Federation of Journalists, for worldwide actions on July 2, 2023, in support of freedom for jailed journalist Julian Assange.)

For the past decade the pursuit of Julian Assange has consumed me with fear – both for Wikileaks founder himself and for all the other journalists who would suffer were he convicted. With his appeal against extradition now rejected, the prospect of his trial in the United States is desperately close.

Perhaps fresh legal instruments will present themselves to halt this process – at the European Court of Human Rights, for example. Much the better solution would be for the US government to realize the damage it is doing, and drop this Trump-era prosecution.

The impact of Assange being jailed in the US would stifle the press at every latitude and all points of the compass. His persecution has already made nervous those journalists who rely on classified material. Should his cell door clang shut for decades, any journalist handed sensitive documents would fret. Whatever the evidence of wrong doing that had landed in their lap, is it worth the risk?

Assange’s conviction would also endanger journalists whenever they travel to countries hostile to the United States. Unsavory regimes will snatch and imprison reporters with impunity. When challenged the despot’s answer will be a shrug, and a nod to the cell holding the Wikileaks founder. Perhaps Putin will never utter the words “Hey, we all lock up the publishers of inconvenient truths”, but is what his smile will say.

Assange’s case is full of misleading complications, contradictory accounts, and prejudice masquerading as common sense. Opinions are skewed by attitudes to the Iraq war; worries about Assange’s disputed conduct in Sweden; and the role of Wikileaks in the election of Donald Trump. Against a backdrop of such conjecture, sticking to what hard facts there are is critical.

Foremost among these are the various incitements for which the US seeks to prosecute Assange. All relate to the publications of the Iraqi and Afghanistan “war logs” – vast information dumps of generally low-grade operational detail from those conflicts. The resulting charges mostly arise from the vaguely worded Espionage Act (ironically, the same legislation under which Trump himself currently faces prosecution).

The case against Assange amounts to this. He sought out a confidential source who had significant evidence of what they considered to be criminal actions by the US military – including shooting down civilians and journalists from a helicopter gunship. Assange is alleged to have coached this individual in discreetly removing this material and then passing it, via Wikileaks, to publishers who would reveal serious criminal actions to the world.

To me, it is obvious that those are actions routinely undertaken by investigative reporters. We would know much less about the war in Vietnam were it not for classified documents leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. Woodward and Bernstein’s account of the Watergate break in would have amounted to little without a confidential source. The Panama papers, Paradise papers and Lux Leaks would not have come to light without journalists and whistleblowers.

If the US government does successfully prosecutes an Australian, who lives in the UK, then the punitive global reach of the Department of Justice will be cemented.

Viewing this process from Europe I am struck by the steady change in opinion towards Assange, however.

He enjoyed a brief period as a poster boy, when major news organizations lined up to make use of his material. After the 2010 publication of the unreacted war logs – by a third party outside Assange’s control, incidentally – he suffered a complete reverse. Former media partners deserted him, Sweden sought his prosecution, and by 2012 he was holed up in the Ecuador’s London embassy.

His fortunes fell further when his hosts of seven years abandoned him in 2019 and he was bundled off to the UK’s most high security prison, where he languishes still.

Since then, however, and the publication of the US charges, support has gradually returned. His former newspaper partners have revised their views. Most have now published editorials calling for his release. And many opinion formers who might not seem like natural Wikileaks supporters have joined the chorus highlighting the dangers of this case. When I spoke with people on the streets of London last year, I struggled to find anyone with an adverse opinion of Assange.

A raft of disturbing evidence of the campaign against the Australian has also come to light. His meetings with his lawyers were bugged, DNA samples were stolen, and plans were hatched for a Putin-style “hit job” on the streets of Kensington.

But President Biden’s government pursues the case.

The case increasingly reminds me of a famous French injustice, that of the Alfred Dreyfus. He was a French army officer wrongly convicted in an anti-semitic conspiracy, and imprisoned between 1894 and 1906. Today, no one doubts that Dreyfus was appallingly wronged by a reactionary establishment. At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, there was no more divisive issue in Europe. Scores of French institutions divided themselves into new organizations, split between the Dreyfusards and their opponents.

Like many other victims of injustice, I’m certain that a time will come when the persecution of Assange will seem every bit as absurd as the case against Dreyfus – or Mandela, or US journalist Evan Gershkovich, currently wrongfully being held in a Moscow jail.

But that needn’t happen – and I hope that it won’t. But without a clamor that brings the US Government to its senses we risk spending the next few decades wondering why we did not speak up? Unless we find our voices to resist, and raise our concerns wherever we can, a monstrous injustice to an individual is in prospect, as is a grievous blow to press freedom. On behalf of the 600,000 journalists around the world who I have the honor to represent, please do not let that happen.

Dominique Pradalié is President of the International Federation of Journalists