The unexpected decision by Judge Vanessa Baraitser to deny a US demand to extradite Julian Assange, foiling efforts to send him to a US super-max jail for the rest of his life, is a welcome legal victory, but one swamped by larger lessons that should disturb us deeply.

Those who campaigned so vigorously to keep Assange’s case in the spotlight, even as the US and UK corporate media worked so strenuously to keep it in darkness, are the heroes of the day. They made the price too steep for Baraitser or the British establishment to agree to lock Assange away indefinitely in the US for exposing its war crimes and its crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But we must not downplay the price being demanded of us for this victory.

A moment of celebration

We have contributed collectively in our various small ways to win back for Assange some degree of freedom, and hopefully a reprieve from what could be a death sentence as his health continues to deteriorate in an overcrowded Belmarsh high-security prison in London that has become a breeding ground for Covid-19.

For this we should allow ourselves a moment of celebration. But Assange is not out of the woods yet. The US has said it will appeal the decision. And it is not yet clear whether Assange will remain jailed in the UK – possibly in Belmarsh – while many months of further legal argument about his future take place.

The US and British establishments do not care where Assange is imprisoned – be it Sweden, the UK or the US. What has been most important to them is that he continues to be locked out of sight in a cell somewhere, where his physical and mental fortitude can be destroyed and where he is effectively silenced, encouraging others to draw the lesson that there is too high a price to pay for dissent.

The personal battle for Assange won’t be over till he is properly free. And even then he will be lucky if the last decade of various forms of incarceration and torture he has been subjected to do not leave him permanently traumatised, emotionally and mentally damaged, a pale shadow of the unapologetic, vigorous transparency champion he was before his ordeal began.

That alone will be a victory for the British and US establishments who were so embarrassed by, and fearful of, Wikileaks’ revelations of their crimes.

Rejected on a technicality

But aside from what is a potential personal victory for Assange, assuming he doesn’t lose on appeal, we should be deeply worried by the legal arguments Baraitser advanced in denying extradition.

The US demand for extradition was rejected on what was effectively a technicality. The US mass incarceration system is so obviously barbaric and depraved that, it was shown conclusively by experts at the hearings back in September, Assange would be at grave risk of committing suicide should he become another victim of its super-max jails.

One should not also discard another of the British establishment’s likely considerations: that in a few days Donald Trump will be gone from the White House and a new US administration will take his place.

There is no reason to be sentimental about president-elect Joe Biden. He is a big fan of mass incarceration too, and he will be no more of a friend to dissident media, whistleblowers and journalism that challenges the national security state than was his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama. Which is no friend at all.

But Biden probably doesn’t need the Assange case hanging over his head, becoming a rallying cry against him, an uncomfortable residue of the Trump administration’s authoritarian instincts that his own officials would be forced to defend.

It would be nice to imagine that the British legal, judicial and political establishments grew a backbone in ruling against extradition. The far more likely truth is that they sounded out the incoming Biden team and received permission to forgo an immediate ruling in favour of extradition – on a technicality.

Keep an eye on whether the new Biden administration decides to drop the appeal case. More likely his officials will let it rumble on, largely below the media’s radar, for many months more.

Journalism as espionage

Significantly, Judge Baraitser backed all the Trump administration’s main legal arguments for extradition, even though they were comprehensively demolished by Assange’s lawyers.

Baraitser accepted the US government’s dangerous new definition of investigative journalism as “espionage”, and implied that Assange had also broken Britain’s draconian Official Secrets Act in exposing government war crimes.

She agreed that the 2007 Extradition Treaty applies in Assange’s case, ignoring the treaty’s actual words that exempt political cases like his. She thereby opened the door for other journalists to be seized in their home countries and renditioned to the US.

Baraitser accepted that protecting sources in the digital age – as Assange did for whistleblower Chelsea Manning, an essential obligation on journalists in a free society – now amounts to criminal “hacking”. She trashed free speech and press freedom rights, saying they did not provide “unfettered discretion by Mr Assange to decide what he’s going to publish”.

She appeared to approve of the ample evidence showing that the US spied on Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy, both in violation of international law and his client-lawyer privilege – a breach of his most fundamental legal rights that alone should have halted proceedings.

Baraitser argued that Assange would receive a fair trial in the US, even though it was almost certain to take place in the eastern district of Virginia, where the major US security and intelligence services are headquartered. Any jury there would be dominated by US security personnel and their families, who would have no sympathy for Assange.

So as we celebrate this ruling for Assange, we must also loudly denounce it as an attack on press freedom, as an attack on our hard-won collective freedoms, and as an attack on our efforts to hold the US and UK establishments accountable for riding roughshod over the values, principles and laws they themselves profess to uphold.

Even as we are offered with one hand a small prize in Assange’s current legal victory, the establishment’s other hand seizes much more from us.

Vilification continues

There is a final lesson from the Assange ruling. The last decade has been about discrediting, disgracing and demonising Assange. This ruling should very much be seen as a continuation of that process.

Baraitser has denied extradition only on the grounds of Assange’s mental health and his autism, and the fact that he is a suicide risk. In other words, the principled arguments for freeing Assange have been decisively rejected.

If he regains his freedom, it will be solely because he has been characterised as mentally unsound. That will be used to discredit not just Assange, but the cause for which he fought, the Wikileaks organisation he helped to found, and all wider dissidence from establishment narratives. This idea will settle into popular public discourse unless we challenge such a presentation at every turn.

Assange’s battle to defend our freedoms, to defend those in far-off lands whom we bomb at will in the promotion of the selfish interests of a western elite, was not autistic or evidence of mental illness. His struggle to make our societies fairer, to hold the powerful to account for their actions, was not evidence of dysfunction. It is a duty we all share to make our politics less corrupt, our legal systems more transparent, our media less dishonest.

Unless far more of us fight for these values – for real sanity, not the perverse, unsustainable, suicidal interests of our leaders – we are doomed. Assange showed us how we can free ourselves and our societies. It is incumbent on the rest of us to continue his fight.

(Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. Article courtesy: CounterPunch.)

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Mexico Offers Asylum to Assange: a Step Forward for Government Accountability and Press Freedom

Frederick B. Mills, Alina Duarte, Patricio Zamorano

On Monday January 4 a British court denied a U.S. request to extradite world renowned journalist and Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, to face charges in the U.S. under the Espionage Act. Shortly after this breaking news, President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), urged the U.K. to consider the possibility of freeing Assange and announced that Mexico “offers political asylum” to the activist.

This bold announcement by López Obrador draws a stark contrast to the revocation of asylum by the President of Ecuador, Lenin Moreno, who turned Assange over to British authorities in April 2019 after the journalist had spent seven years inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. To provide political cover for this controversial act, part of the mainstream press deployed character assassination, painting an image of an erratic Assange, ungrateful for Ecuadorian hospitality. Numerous human rights and civil liberty organizations, however, denounced the decision of the Moreno administration to violate Assange’s diplomatic protection and allow the police to penetrate the Embassy building and arrest the journalist. The sudden reversal of Ecuador’s provision of asylum and protection was consistent, however, with Moreno’s dramatic pivot to the right after he was elected on a leftist platform. It was viewed by his critics as an act of subordination of Ecuador’s foreign policy to the imperatives of Washington.

The struggle to free Assange is far from over. Since Judge Vanessa Baraitser employed the humanitarian argument that extradition to the U.S. could lead Assange to attempt suicide, instead of using the substantive arguments advanced by Assange’s legal team, the door remains wide open to a United States appeal which could drag out litigation for months or even years. Assange’s lawyers argued that he was acting as a journalist when he published leaked documents about U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that these disclosures are protected by the First Amendment.

The international campaign to free Assange anticipates a continuing legal fight. Many of Assange’s supporters are petitioning President Donald Trump to pardon him, and failing that, will urge the incoming Biden administration not to pursue an appeal of the U.K.’s denial of extradition.

A history of protection of the persecuted

The Mexican gesture came as a surprise to many observers, but it was not out of character, as Mexico has a proud tradition of granting or offering asylum or protection to the persecuted including Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, José Martí, Leon Trotsky, Pablo Neruda, León Felipe, Héctor José Campora, Mohammad Reza Palhevi (the Shah of Iran), Rigoberta Menchú, Enrique Dussel, and most recently former president of Bolivia Evo Morales.

By offering asylum to Evo Morales after an Organization of American States (OAS) backed coup in November 2019, López Obrador placed Mexico on the side of popular sovereignty in the Americas against the Lima Group’s complicity with the drive to bring about regime change in Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba, in addition to Bolivia. And by offering Assange asylum López Obrador adds political clout to the growing international outrage at the detention and psychological torture of Assange. AMLO has also put Mexico on the world stage and has conferred legitimacy on the actions of Assange and Wikileaks, that revealed to the world numerous illegal activities perpetrated by the U.S., including war crimes, clandestine operations and meddling in the internal political affairs of dozens of countries, foes and allies alike. Offering asylum to Assange shows respect, from the heart of the Americas, for human rights, international law, sovereign equality of nations, political independence, and multilateralism.

AMLO and his political project, also named in Wikileaks

Although López Obrador formalized his offer of political asylum at the beginning of 2021, he had already expressed his sympathy and support for the journalist as early as January 2020: “I wish that he be forgiven and released. I do not know if he has recognized that he acted against the rules and against a political system, but at the time these cables showed how the world system works in its authoritarian nature, they are like state secrets that were known thanks to this investigation and to the release of these cables. Hopefully he will receive the consideration he deserves and be freed and tortured no more.”

The Mexican president also revealed how the cables released by Wikileaks covered the work of his political movement. “Here are cables that were released when we were in the opposition that spoke of our struggle and I can prove that they are true.” He added that “what is expressed here, reflects the reality at that time, of illegal relationships, of illegal actions, illegitimate violations of sovereignty, contrary to democracy, to freedoms.” That is why, López Obrador pointed out, “I express my solidarity, my wish that he be forgiven” because “if he offers an apology and he is released, it will be a very just cause in favor of the human rights of the world. It is an act of humility from the authority that has to decide on the freedom of this researcher.”

Safety of journalists still a challenge in Mexico

The announcement made by López Obrador regarding journalist Julian Assange unleashed a series of reactions regarding freedom of expression and contradictory policies of the current Mexican administration.

On one hand the president has indicated that his administration backs freedom of the press: “out of conviction, we never, ever, would limit freedom of expression. None of the freedoms.” He also said that “it fills me with pride that freedom of expression is guaranteed. This hadn’t happened in a long time. The media, the press, were either sold or rented to the regime. This is new, something to celebrate.”

However, the opposition, human rights advocates and concerned journalists highlight that there is still a pending debt with reporters in Mexico, because during the first two years of AMLO as president, 17 journalists have been assassinated according to the organization Article 19. The Mexican government recognizes even a higher number: the Ministry of the Interior has announced that 38 communicators have been murdered from December 2018 to December 2020. This indicates that there are high levels of impunity in this type of crime, since currently only two cases have resulted in convictions, 23 cases remain under investigation, and 13 are in litigation. It should be noted that the violence against journalists didn’t begin with AMLO’s administration. During the term of Enrique Peña Nieto, 47 journalists were assassinated, while under Felipe Calderón, 48, making Mexico one of the most dangerous countries to practice journalism.

Mexico’s offer of asylum to Julian Assange bolsters the cause of Latin American independence by countering the subordination of the OAS, and in particular the Lima Group, to U.S. foriegn policy and exposing the underside of Washington’s interference in the internal affairs of other nations. It also promotes the values of humanitarian protection against political persecution from Latin America to the planetary stage. It advances the case of those advocating more transparency and the right to information from their governments at a time when there is mass surveillance of citizens. López Obrador recognizes that democracy can only flourish when governments are accountable to an informed citizenry. He has done us all a service.

[Courtesy: Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), a nonprofit independent research and information organization, based in Washington DC. All three writers are part of the COHA team.]