{"id":58862,"date":"2015-06-01T12:00:46","date_gmt":"2015-06-01T11:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=58862"},"modified":"2015-06-01T13:10:12","modified_gmt":"2015-06-01T12:10:12","slug":"the-pre-charge-punishment-of-julian-assange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/06\/the-pre-charge-punishment-of-julian-assange\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pre-charge Punishment of Julian Assange"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Amy<\/a>

Amy Goodman<\/p><\/div>\n

28 May 2015 – <\/em>Tucked away on a side street in one of London\u2019s toniest neighborhoods, just across the street from the sprawling department store Harrods, sits a brick, Victorian-era apartment building that houses the Ecuadorean Embassy. Julian Assange, the founder and editor of the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks, walked into this embassy on June 19, 2012, and hasn\u2019t stepped foot outside since.<\/p>\n

Ecuador granted him political asylum, but the United Kingdom refuses to grant him safe passage to leave the country. Instead, the U.K. wants to extradite him to Sweden to answer questions about allegations of sexual misconduct, although charges have never been filed. For close to three years, he has remained a prisoner in the embassy, denied even the hour of sunlight daily that most prisoners are guaranteed. For two years before that, he was either jailed or under strict house arrest in England, all without charge. When I went to London to interview him in the embassy this week, Assange asserted his belief that this pretrial phase is serving as both punishment and deterrent, and that Sweden is acting as a surrogate for the United States, which wants him jailed to stop the work of WikiLeaks.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, WikiLeaks continues, releasing groundbreaking information about potentially catastrophic conditions in Britain\u2019s nuclear-weapons submarines, full chapters of the secret and intensely controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade treaty, and more. It was from within the embassy that Assange helped National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden escape Hong Kong after releasing millions of documents detailing U.S. government surveillance programs. En route to political asylum in Latin America, Snowden became stranded in the Moscow airport only after the United States canceled his passport. Russia then granted him temporary political asylum.<\/p>\n

\"WikiLeaks<\/a>

WikiLeaks founder Assange gestures during a news conference on August 18, 2014, at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. John Stillwell\/pool\/Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

When the sexual-misconduct allegations surfaced in late 2010, Assange waited in Stockholm for the prosecutor to question him, then the charges were dropped. He had government permission to leave the country. It was only after he traveled to the United Kingdom that the charges were resuscitated by a second prosecutor. This second prosecutor, Marianne Ny, has had years to question Assange, either in person in London or via video link. Instead, she insisted that Assange be forcibly extradited, until a Swedish court ruled that she should interview him in London. She has now indicated that she will, but so far has not said when.<\/p>\n

Assange, his lawyers and his supporters are concerned that, if he were extradited, Sweden would hand him over to the United States, where all signs point to a secret grand-jury investigation of him and WikiLeaks. \u201cJulian would have gone to Sweden a long time ago had he gotten a guarantee from Sweden that they will not forward him to the United States for standing trial on the espionage charges,\u201d said Assange attorney Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Ratner explained: \u201cSweden has never been willing to give that guarantee. And Sweden has a very bad reputation of complying with U.S. demands, whether it was sending some people from Sweden to Egypt for torture or whether it\u2019s guaranteeing people who are asylees in Sweden that they won\u2019t be deported.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vice President Joe Biden called Assange a \u201chigh-tech terrorist,\u201d and elected officials and pundits from both major parties have said publicly that he should be assassinated. Assange told me: \u201cThe U.S. case against WikiLeaks is widely believed to be the largest-ever investigation into a publisher. It is extraterritorial. It\u2019s setting new precedents about the ability of the U.S. government to reach out to any media publisher in Europe or the rest of the world, and try and achieve a prosecution. They say the offenses are conspiracy, conspiracy to commit espionage, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, computer hacking, conversion, stealing government documents.\u201d The espionage charges, if they materialize, could come with the death penalty. Sweden, like most European nations, cannot extradite a person who might thereafter be put to death.<\/p>\n

The statute of limitations will expire in August on all but one of the potential Swedish offenses for which Assange is wanted for questioning. The Swedish Supreme Court declined to quash the arrest warrant lodged against him in late 2010, in a 4-1 vote. Justice Svante Johansson, dissenting, wrote that Assange\u2019s de facto detention was \u201cin violation of the principle of proportionality.\u201d Sitting across from me in the conference room of the small embassy that has for three years served as his home, his refuge and his jail, Assange told me, \u201cWe have no rights as a defendant because the formal trial hasn\u2019t started yet. No charges, no trial, no ability to defend yourself … don\u2019t even have the right to documents, because you\u2019re not even a defendant.\u201d His skin is pale from years without sunlight, matching his prematurely white hair. But his resolve is unbroken, and the leaks he originally sought to publish when he founded WikiLeaks almost 10 years ago are still reaching the light of day.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

Amy Goodman is the host of \u201cDemocracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of \u201c<\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier,\u201d<\/em> recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No charges, no trial, no ability to defend yourself … don\u2019t even have the right to documents, because you\u2019re not even a defendant.\u201d His skin is pale from years without sunlight, matching his prematurely white hair. But his resolve is unbroken, and the leaks he originally sought to publish when he founded WikiLeaks almost 10 years ago are still reaching the light of day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58862\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}