Things are about to get messy for Australia’s international relationships.
The decision by Swedish prosecutors to close their long-running investigation of Julian Assange (for a second time; the Chief Prosecutor of Stockholm dismissed all but one of the allegations in 2010, before political figures intervened) leaves the Australian government with less and less room to hide on the key question of whether it will object to the prosecution of an Australian for his journalism.
The end of the investigation — a decision that could be appealed by the complainants — removes any hurdle to the extradition of Assange from the United Kingdom to the United States, where he faces 18 criminal charges over his leaks of classified US military documents, which could lead to 175 years in jail.
The UK government has agreed to the extradition, with that decision now to be contested by Assange in UK courts, where there are several precedents for US extradition requests being rejected. If Assange’s appeal is successful, he is likely to be deported to Australia, from where the US could again seek to extradite him.
The Swedish investigation of Assange was always riddled with wild improbabilities, bizarre inconsistencies and a peculiar reluctance by the governments of both countries to ever actually move the investigation forward; Swedish authorities intended to drop the case in 2013 but were dissuaded by the UK government.
Throughout that time, both countries professed outrage that Assange had taken refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, despite his remaining available for questioning. After repeated, manufactured delays, prosecutors eventually questioned him in 2016, then abandoned their investigation of part of the sexual assault claims in 2017. After Assange was forced out of the embassy by the Ecuadorean government, Sweden briefly re-opened the investigation, leading to a potential clash between extradition requests. That hurdle has now been removed.
Long-time Assange supporter barrister Greg Barns says Assange’s future lies in the hands of the UK courts and, potentially, Australia. “If the UK decides not to extradite Assange, this will become a matter which falls into the lap of the Morrison government,” he said. If Assange wins, he would be returned to Australia as his UK visa has well and truly expired. Once on home soil, he is likely to face new extradition requests by the US. “Then the issue is whether Australia would seek to extradite him,” Barnes said. “We’ve been saying it would be unconscionable for them to do that.”
But these possibilities are years away, given how long the court process and subsequent appeals are likely to take. For now, Barnes said, Australia should be working on getting Assange — who is seriously ill — assistance in prison.
“It’s incumbent on the Australian government to ensure he’s provided with decent healthcare and is able to prepare his case,” he said. Assange has been detained in isolation without access to legal papers or a computer, according to WikiLeaks, despite his UK lawyers requesting assistance from the Australian government. “The foreign minister and high commissioner need to speak with their counterparts in the UK,” Barnes said.
The US extradition request for Assange centres on WikiLeaks’ publication of diplomatic material provided by Chelsea Manning, relying on arguments that Assange conspired with Manning to hack US military information systems. The prosecution is widely seen, even by Assange critics, as, in the words of one conservative commentator, “a mortal threat to a free and independent press”.
The Australian government, which is conducting its own war on a free press — with police raids on media outlets and journalists, prosecutions of whistleblowers, and harassment of those who embarrass Scott Morrison’s Coalition — has remained silent on whether an Australian should be extradited for journalism.
This makes for an extraordinary contrast with the government’s activism in relation to other Australians held overseas, whether refugee soccer player Hakeem al-Araibi illegally held in Thailand, Australian travellers Jolie King and Mark Firkin in Iran, Jock Palfreeman in Bulgaria or Australians held in China. In all cases, the government was active in working to secure their release, or vocal about their detention and treatment.
Of course, none of those countries are Australia’s imperial overlord and security guarantor, the United States. But the government’s silence on the prosecution of Assange is becoming more and more difficult to maintain.
Article 4 para 3 of the UK/USA Extradition Treaty states that :
3. Notwithstanding the terms of paragraph 2 of this Article, extradition shall not be granted if the competent authority of the Requested State determines that the request was politically motivated. In the United States, the executive branch is the competent authority for the purposes of this Article.
With the Swedish authorities dropping the rape charges it comes down to whether the USA charges are politically motivated : that shouldn’t be too difficult to determine. In the meantime Assange should be released on bail and our government should demand this as a minimum on behalf of an Australian citizen.
You can read the Extradition Treaty here : https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/243246/7146.pdf
Let me help explain why the Swedes have ‘discontinued’ their investigation.
When Assange was illegally dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy earlier this year, the Swedish legal system swung back into action, and said they would re-open their investigation (an ‘all options open’ thing).
Sometime after Professor (of international law, no less) Nils Melzer, the UN appointed Special Rapporteur on Torture (“Special” precisely because he is acknowledged as an expert on international law – which is predominately about “HUMAN RIGHTS”!), again visited Assange, took medical and psychological experts with him to examine Assange, and again concluded Assange had been, and was being, TORTURED!!
Such a finding is inconvenient and embarrassing for the torturers and their accomplices.
So, what did the torturers and their accomplices do? They ignored Melzer, completely fresh aired a man they have been only too happy to defer to, when the subject of his assessments happened to be ‘regimes’ like Iran.
Melzer came to Australia, seeking to inform both the government and the citizenry in Assange’s ‘home’.
Such was the interest from the Australian media, that Nils Melzer had to self publish at medium.com.
Well, when Melzer received no response from any of the governments, he decided to utterly destroy the Swedish government’s pretence of operating by a ‘rule of law’.
On Sept 12th, Nils Melzer ‘addressed’ the Swedes. This is that address;
https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=24838
“Mandate of the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or
punishment
REFERENCE:
AL SWE 4/2019
12 September 2019
Excellency………………..”
And, note the ‘kickers’ applied by Melzer, including Sweden’s ‘demonstrated behaviours’, such as being a willing participant in the CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition’ program, in which they extradited citizens from elsewhere, so they could be TORTURED by other US client states.
All the rest is just opinion.
P.S. I should have included “worthless” between the 2nd last and last words.
And, Nils Melzer has not ‘heard back’ from the Swedish ‘authorities’. If you read the above linked document, you will see Melzer was far from shy in suggesting those Swedish authorities should ‘put up, or STFU’ – in a purely legal sense, you understand.
Thank you David for your comments and link to the report on the case that drove Julian Assange to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. I don’t often open links to documents such as Nils Melzer’s report to the UN on the actions of the Swedish Government in their case against Assange as the academic legal speak is often exhausting. This 19 page submission, however, is clear, meticulous in detail and compellingly ( jaw -dropping in
fact) . I cannot understand how it received neither governmental nor media response or did I miss yours Crikey ?
Would you consider getting over to ‘The Australian’ article today https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/julian-assange-could-die-soon-in-prison-doctors-warn-british-authorities/news-story/89c09c4880d2a0832d9c8c3294ee967e and replying to the overwhelmingly vicious and uninformed comments being made without the background info you provided here.
Assange said, when the Swedish charges were closed and then revived for political purposes, that the case was really about Sweden holding him then sending him to the USA to face charges there. It is a tactic that has worked. Now that the UK authorities have him in jail and facing extradition to US there is no political need for the Swedish case to be maintained.
Swedish, UK, USA and Australian authorities come badly out of this, both in their disregard for international law and for their secrecy and collusion. But the situation for Assange is much more dangerous. Rule of law? – what political bullshit that is.
Then there’s the Bali nine that the government lifted no finger for, or Schappel Corby, and there are lots of examples where the government sits on its meek little arse.
Of course we should be supporting Assange and tell USA to bugger off if he gets back here, but that pig won’t fly.
We are very selective about who we support and when. Being Australian doesn’t seem to guarantee much from your government at all.
Kishor, Amber, Bernard… if Assange was ‘only’ producing journalism then I agree: there’s a serious democratic principle at play. But even if he was sometimes producing journalism that doesn’t mean it’s all he was doing.
But regardless, you didn’t define journalism, establish what independent criteria should be used to recognise it, or defend your bare assertion that Assange (an activist and ex-hacker with a principally political agenda) was only doing that. So you built an inflammatory article on a bare assertion.
And that’s a pity because if you could explain clearly to your readers what journalism actually is or ought to be, what kind of information sourcing and publishing isn’t journalism and why not, and who should have the authority to say, you might be doing your readership, our democracy and your own conflicted, entitled, and frequently corrupt industry a favour.
Journalism is about telling the truth. It’s not about listing “both” sides of the argument then sitting on the fence all smug, because you have written a balanced article. If all the issues relating to an article are all “balanced” morally then it’s not worth reporting. Who cares?
If a reporter sees a little child die as a consequence of Obama’s drones, or in JA’s case the British who were supposed to have invented justice (the Magna Cata) virtually torture him then the right thing for a journalist to do is call this out. Assange may not be a perfect human being, who is? But he’s no worse and probably a damn sight better better than the people who persecute him.
Robert wrote: Journalism is about telling the truth. It’s not about listing “both” sides of the argument then sitting on the fence all smug, because you have written a balanced article. If all the issues relating to an article are all “balanced” morally then it’s not worth reporting. Who cares?
Thank you for that opinion, Robert. If your opinion holds then all reportable public-interest information, no matter how responsibly or ethically sourced, when published, should be seen as journalism.
Is that the position you hold? That any matter, no matter how sourced, and regardless how published to what end, should be held exempt from legal liability provided it’s truthful?
If so, would you defend a foreign nation or non-state actor hacking into government information — perhaps including information held about private citizens — and publishing it it before an election in the most inflammatory way possible with a view to influencing the outcome of the election?
If so, you uphold the principle that our rights to privacy and security are voided the moment any information is known by a potential publisher.
Or if not, then perhaps you feel (as I do) that journalism is not simply about publishing truth. It also entails some sort of professional accountability to sourcing and publishing information toward serving the public good.
The way I say it is that the key value of information is in helping better decision-making, so the information we publish is really only defensible as and when it helps a society make better decisions in the public good. Moreover, we are also ethically (if not legally) liable for poor outcomes made in consequence of the way information may be sourced, organised and presented: possibly willful ignorance is no excuse for professional negligence occasioning harm.
That’s a much more nuanced approach to ethics I think. Yet I think it’s one most Australians want to see: we’re not generally a nation that loves yellow journalism and a laissez-faire approach to privacy and security.
We might disagree on the lines then, but perhaps not on the broader principle that service to the public interest is about more than simply publishing whatever truthful information we can lay hands on.
And if so, then the question of how Wikileaks’ information was sourced, how curated and how used becomes more nuanced and more subject to legal examination too.
With that said, Mr Assange could seek to mount a defence for what he did. I’m not saying he couldn’t. We could also argue about what a fair trial for such a question might look like, and how it should be made accountable to the public interest and not just political or ideological interests. I just don’t hold that he’s automatically exempt from accountability for those questions as the article above implied.
I’m especially concerned because I know that a professor of journalistic ethics contacted Wikileaks years before the sensational ‘Collateral Murder’ reports (for example), to try to help Wikileaks establish a framework of ethical journalistic accountability — and was ignored. Mr Assange’s ego hasn’t really done him any favours in the history of Wikileaks.
Regardless, I believe there’s more to discuss here than just recycling emotive, knee-jerk opinion, and think it connects to more than just the future of Wikileaks. I’m disappointed that it took three Crikey journalists to squib the core issue in favour of yet more blind pot-banging. Hence my comment.
Supreme obfuscation, Ruv.
The only thing that needs to be ‘discussed’ is, has the law been fully and appropriately applied in the case of Assange.
I could not give a flying you-know-what for people’s ‘opinions’, be those opinions on the ‘ethics of journalism’, whether Assange is or isn’t a journalist, publisher or buck toothed idiot – this is about the Western hemisphere’s hyprocrisy, in barking about the ‘rule of law’, the ‘international rules based order’, and all the rest of those PR narratives, when they pay no attendance to any of ’em, when it suits.
Irony! Earlier this week, within one 24 hour period, Trump pardoned war criminals convicted under the US ‘justice’ system (as his predecessors had done, in various ways, including O’Bomber), and the BBC and the Sunday Times, much to the surprise of reasonably cognisant beings, revealed the UK military justice system had been concealing alleged war crimes committed by British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yet, many people in Australia, where the former Fairfax have been investigating alleged war crimes committed by Australian special forces in Afghanistan, remain subject to the same pejorative ‘commentary’ about the bloke (and his organisation) who had the balls to reveal to various citizenries what was being done to poor black and brown people in their name.
So, spare me ‘nuanced’ commentary about the ‘ethics’ of journalism – I’ve spent a fair bit of today trying to get MSM in Australia to acknowledge Nils Melzer’s conclusions, and he’s a goddamn professor of international law.
And, if you want more, including on what Assange did, or didn’t ‘curate’, I suggest you find the session held in the European Parliament last week, which had both Melzer and Bob Carr present the details of the absolute bastardry rained down on Assange by the US and their abject vassal client states.
https://web-guengl.streamovations.be/index.php/event/stream/journalism-is-not-a-crime-the-assange-extradition-case
And, for a brilliant condensing of the ‘case against Assange’, watch the introduction by the Irish MEP, Claire Daly.
David wrote: The only thing that needs to be ‘discussed’ is, has the law been fully and appropriately applied in the case of Assange.
I think you’re conflating an ‘is’ (we are discussing that), with an ‘ought’ David (we ought be discussing nothing else.)
As Mr Assange is an Australian citizen, his disposition is worth discussing; I agree, but this organ has made the same tired arguments countless times, and other journals have piled on too. So while it’s fair to note that the context for potential extradition is changing, I don’t believe such reportage has produced much new actionable insight.
I personally think the citizens of democracies in twenty years’ time will care more about how we understood and protected journalism than what happened to Mr Assange, and I’m concerned that Crikey’s reporters are blindly glossing bedrock issues here to keep repeating the same political point.
It wouldn’t matter how many definitions of journalism are trotted out. The Americans want him and as usual it doesn’t matter what international laws or human rights they have to trample over, they will get him. With England willing to do anything to curry favour with the US in the wake of Brexit and Australian govt being so weak in regard to its overseas citizens’ rights, I don’t hold out much hope for Assange. Especially when you consider our man in London is ultra right winger Brandis and Morrison’s penchant for going all the way with Trump’s USA. But hey, I would loved to be proven totally wrong and Assange arrives home in time for xmas.
Bref wrote: It wouldn’t matter how many definitions of journalism are trotted out.
That’s true if you care only about Assange’s eventual fate.
But I think it also matters to the changing face of journalism, the increasing ability for governments and non-state actors to use information flows to influence civil behaviours and democratic processes, and to the future of off-shore data aggregators like Wikileaks and new medium reportage of the sort (say) Buzzfeed does.
Nothing Assange has achieved requires his continued participation to accomplish, so pragmatically, freeing Assange won’t really help democracy, while imprisoning him won’t be substantially worse than what is routinely done in the history of government intelligence and security maneuvers. That’s not to condone anything; I’m just saying that despite the obvious sentiments involved, I don’t see much strategic significance.
Yet in the longer term, I think government and industry clarity for defining and holding accountable the journalism they mean to protect is vastly more important than the result of a single case affecting a single accused who published an embarrassing moment in US geopolitics.
I totally understand the concern of left-leaning journalists in holding populist right-wing policies to account, but think they could be doing more constructive things about it than banging pot-lids about freeing Assange. Their own standards of journalism simply aren’t high enough to be arguing ‘just trust us; we know he’s a journalist.’
Ruv, your nuanced concerns are impressive, but I bet you would not have the courage to put your life on the line to defend investigative journalism or international justice.
Fairmind, having just endured testifying at a trial regarding the death of my late wife, I’d appreciate you living up to the aspirations of your name, avoiding cheap ad-hominems and sticking to what you actually know.
Thank you.
Again, obfuscatory drivel.
This is about the law, and absolutely nothing else.
“..imprisoning him won’t be substantially worse than what is routinely done in the history of government intelligence and security maneuvers…”
Really? It already is “substantially worse”, by any measure, and measured against actual law.
Tell ya what, if he dies while in Belmarsh or, subsequently, in a Yank ‘supermax’, I look forward to further enlightened opinions from your good self.
Why is it so damned hard for people to see what is staring them right in the face?!
Gillard; ‘He’s a criminal’, Clinton; ‘Can’t we just drone the guy’, Beckel; ‘I’m against the death penalty, so let’s just illegally shoot the son of a bitch’, and the list of psychopathic ‘advice’ goes on and on, ad infinitum.
‘Journalism ethics?’
You mean like the ‘ethics of Judith Miller, when she knowingly advanced the bullshit about Iraq having WMD?
Or, in the Bubba era, when an ‘ethical journalist’ had the unmitigated gall to ask Madeleine Albright whether she thought killing 500,000 Iraqis by using sanctions (e.g. on medicines) was ‘worth it’.
And, proceeded to sit there mute, when ‘Maddy’ said ‘Yep’.
Or, when the media chuckled along with Killary, when she said; ‘We came, we saw, he died”, on seeing Gaddafi have a sword stuck up his arse.
How’s Libya going today? From the richest per capita nation in Africa, with a policy of equitable distribution of that wealth, to a nation that now has slave markets frequented by old style European slave ‘traders’.
But, hey, let’s have a ‘balanced discussion’!
David wrote: This is about the law
Definitely.
David added: and absolutely nothing else.
I think that’s your is-ought fallacy again, David.
Law is created by legislators in response to a changing reality; international law is also moderated by treaty and informed and reinterpreted by shifting geopolitics, changing economics and a shifting technological landscape.
Assange’s disposition is vexed exactly because he’s not an on-the-ground reporter snapping pics and writing first-hand accounts. He’s a hacker/activist/aggregator/publisher the like of which had very little precedent in the laws legislated to protect old-school journalism.
Wikileaks has certainly benefited journalism, and if we want to declare its operation journalism only too then we can do so. If we do, then there are both legal and diplomatic measures one could apply to help Mr Assange — so either way it’s not just about the law.
But we can’t make that declaration responsibly without also considering the other, possibly unintended consequences of doing so.
I don’t believe it’s as simple as Crikey’s journalists claim, but if they want to so argue then let them please at least have the honesty to submit those arguments to reader scrutiny and critique.