A British judge ruled Monday that Julian Assange should not be extradited to the United States to face criminal charges brought by the Justice Department.
The ruling was handed down by Judge Vanessa Baraitser of the Westminster Magistrates’ Court following months of hearings and after a morning appearance by Assange at the Old Bailey courthouse in London, which he was brought to from the maximum-security Belmarsh prison, where he has been held for well over a year.
She highlighted the isolated conditions he would likely face in the U.S. would be “oppressive” and a risk to his mental health, saying the Wikileaks founder was “a depressed and sometimes despairing man” who had the “intellect and determination” to circumvent any suicide prevention measures taken by the authorities.
Assange, 49, was charged under the 1917 Espionage Act as well as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
“Faced with the conditions of near total isolation without the protective factors which limited his risk at HMP Belmarsh, I am satisfied the procedures described by the US will not prevent Mr. Assange from finding a way to commit suicide,” Baraitser said as she ordered his discharge. The U.S. now has 15 days to appeal, which the U.S. government said it would do. A bail hearing is now set for Wednesday, where the judge will determine if Assange should be freed pending appeal.
If found guilty on all the charges, he faces up to 175 years in prison, though the U.S. had said it would likely only be four to six years. The coronavirus pandemic slowed and delayed the extradition hearings. Baraitser’s role was not to decide guilt but rather whether the extradition request meets the requirements under the U.S.–U.K. Extradition Treaty of 2003.
Federal prosecutors accused Assange of violating the Espionage Act as part of a superseding indictment in May 2019, charging him on 17 counts in addition to the single count first unsealed in 2019. The Justice Department said those charges “relate to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.”
The U.S. alleges Assange “actively solicited United States classified information, including by publishing a list of ‘Most Wanted Leaks’ that sought, among other things, classified documents” starting in late 2009. Describing Assange as “the public face of WikiLeaks,” the Justice Department said he founded the website with the purpose of it being “an intelligence agency of the people.” The Justice Department said what WikiLeaks published “included names of local Afghans and Iraqis who had provided information to U.S. and coalition forces,” which prosecutors alleged, “created a grave and imminent risk that the innocent people he named would suffer serious physical harm and/or arbitrary detention.”
Assange has not been charged, however, for his organization’s role in exposing the CIA’s “Vault 7” program in 2017, a massive document dump that revealed details about the agency’s electronic surveillance and hacking capabilities, nor was he charged in connection to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
“Mr. Assange faces the bleak prospect of severely restrictive detention conditions designed to remove physical contact and reduce social interaction and contact with the outside world to a bare minimum. He faces these prospects as someone with a diagnosis of clinical depression and persistent thoughts of suicide,” the judge ruled, adding, “I find that Mr. Assange’s risk of committing suicide, if an extradition order were to be made, to be substantial.”
The judge noted in her ruling that alleged child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was determined to have died by suicide at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in August 2019 and that Chelsea Manning, who provided classified information to Assange years ago, allegedly attempted suicide in March 2020 at the Alexandria Detention Center, where Manning was being held at the time for refusing to testify before a secret grand jury.
“I accept that oppression as a bar to extradition requires a high threshold. I also accept that there is a strong public interest in giving effect to treaty obligations and that this is an important factor to have in mind,” Baraitser concluded. “However, I am satisfied that, in these harsh conditions, Mr. Assange’s mental health would deteriorate causing him to commit suicide with the ‘single minded determination’ of his autism spectrum disorder.”
Marc Raimondi, the acting director of public affairs for the Justice Department, said DOJ’s legal efforts would carry on.
“While we are extremely disappointed in the court’s ultimate decision, we are gratified that the United States prevailed on every point of law raised,” Raimondi said. “In particular, the court rejected all of Mr. Assange’s arguments regarding political motivation, political offense, fair trial, and freedom of speech. We will continue to seek Mr. Assange’s extradition to the United States.”
Multiple Republicans have reportedly urged Trump to pardon Assange, while others have emphasized the crimes he has allegedly committed and advised the president against it.
“Julian Assange said ‘a 14 year old could have hacked [Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John] Podesta’ — why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!” Trump tweeted in early January 2017, adding the next day that “the dishonest media likes saying that I am in Agreement with Julian Assange — wrong. I simply state what he states, it is for the people…”
If Trump does not pardon Assange, President-elect Joe Biden’s Justice Department is lined up to determine how to proceed.
“I would argue that it’s closer to being a hi-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers,” Biden said in 2010 when he was vice president. “Look, this guy has done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of people in other parts of the world. … It has done damage.”
It remains unclear just what Biden would do now as president.
Until his arrest in April 2019, Assange had been granted political asylum for seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, taking refuge there in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was wanted for questioning in a sexual assault investigation. Assange was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison in May 2019 upon being found guilty of breaking his bail conditions in 2012. However, even after finishing that sentence, he has been kept at Belmarsh prison over concerns about Assange absconding.
Assange’s fiancée Stella Moris, who secretly had two of Assange’s children while he was hiding out in the Ecuadorian embassy, delivered a statement to the press outside the courthouse on Monday.
“I had hoped that today would be the day that Julian would come home. Today is not that day, but that day will come soon,” Moris said. “As long as Julian has to endure suffering and isolation as an unconvicted prisoner in Belmarsh Prison, and as long as our children continue to be bereft of their father’s love and affection, we cannot celebrate. We will celebrate the day he comes home.”
“The mere fact that this case has made it to court let alone gone on this long is an historic, large-scale attack on freedom of speech,” WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson recently said, adding that “this is a fight that affects each and every person’s right to know and is being fought collectively.”
The Justice Department has argued that Assange and his compatriots “recruited and agreed with hackers to commit computer intrusions to benefit WikiLeaks” and “the broadened hacking conspiracy continues to allege that Assange conspired with Army Intelligence Analyst Chelsea Manning to crack a password hash to a classified U.S. Department of Defense computer.” Manning was convicted at a court-martial trial in 2013, and the 35-year sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama days before his presidency ended in January 2017.
Sections of Robert Mueller’s report, unveiled this summer, raised the possibility that Trump lied in written answers about his conversations with longtime confidant Roger Stone about Assange.
“It is possible that, by the time the President submitted his written answers two years after the relevant events had occurred, he no longer had clear recollections of his discussions with Stone or his knowledge of Stone’s asserted communications with WikiLeaks,” Mueller’s report said. “But the President’s conduct could also be viewed as reflecting his awareness that Stone could provide evidence that would run counter to the President’s denials and would link the President to Stone’s efforts to reach out to WikiLeaks.”
Assange attorney Barry Pollack said in 2019 that the “unprecedented charges” against his client “demonstrate the gravity of the threat the criminal prosecution of Julian Assange poses to all journalists.”
The Justice Department said in court filings that “Manning responded to Assange’s solicitations by using access granted to her as an intelligence analyst to search for United States classified documents, and provided to Assange and WikiLeaks databases containing approximately 90,000 Afghanistan war-related significant activity reports, 400,000 Iraq war-related significant activities reports, 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs, and 250,000 U.S. Department of State cables.”
