Killing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with a drone strike would violate international law, according to a United Nations envoy and expert on summary executions.
The website True Pundit on Monday reported that Hillary Clinton had raised the possibility of using a drone strike against Assange during her term as secretary of state, citing unnamed State Department sources. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, said on Monday that he was “reticent to comment” on the veracity of the report.
True Pundit then sought input from Agnes Callamard, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, who said such a strike would be illegal. “A state could theoretically seek to justify the use of drones by invoking the right to anticipatory self-defense against a nonstate actor and by arguing that it had no means to capture their targets or cause another state to capture the target,” she said.
“To do so, the state would have to demonstrate an ‘instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment of deliberation’ necessity,” Callamard said. “This is not only a very high threshold to meet, it is also impossible to see how this could be used or justified in the case of Mr. Julian Assange.”
Clinton allegedly made the comment months before WikiLeaks released 250,000 diplomatic cables, dated 1966 to 2010.
This summer, WikiLeaks published documents obtained from the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The leak led to the resignation of top DNC officials, including chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
The organization was widely expected to release up to 100,000 pages of documents leaked from Clinton’s campaign or affiliated entities, like the nonprofit Clinton Foundation and Democratic Party. However, Assange downplayed those reports early Tuesday, using a widely-anticipated press conference to explain that future document dumps would be staggered, and tamping down on expectations that they might cause damage to Clinton.
