Assange escapes extradition to US for now, pending assurances

Wednesday, March 27th 2024 - 18:28 UTC

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A UK Court decided on Tuesday that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange may not be extradited to face espionage charges in the United States, at least until assurances are received from Washington that the death penalty will not be sought. It was no legal victory for Assaange's supporters who claimed that the only acceptable outcome would be ”no extradition” at all. The British government signed an extradition order in June 2022, which Assange has appealed. Read full article

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imoyaro
Great news, he's deteriorating. They don't want to execute him, they want to continue the process. Slow but sure... ;)
Mar 27th, 2024 - 07:24 pm - Link - Report abuse -1
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Terence Hill
”The indictment of Assange is a blueprint for making journalists into felons By Glenn Greenwald
The U.S. government unveiled an 18-count indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, charging him under the 1917 Espionage Act for his role in the 2010 publication of a trove of secret documents relating to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and diplomatic communications regarding dozens of nations. So extreme and unprecedented are the indictment’s legal theories and likely consequences that it shocked and alarmed even many of Assange’s most virulent critics.
With these new charges, the Trump administration is aggressively and explicitly seeking to obliterate the last reliable buffer protecting journalism in the United States from being criminalized, a step that no previous administration, no matter how hostile to journalistic freedom, was willing to take. The U.S. government has been eager to prosecute Assange since the 2010 leaks.
The argument offered by both the Trump administration that Assange isn’t a journalist at all and thus deserves no free press protections. But this claim overlooks the indictment’s real danger and, worse, displays a wholesale ignorance of the First Amendment. Press freedoms belong to everyone, not to a select, privileged group of citizens called “journalists.” Empowering prosecutors to decide who does or doesn’t deserve press protections would restrict “freedom of the press” to a small, cloistered priesthood of privileged citizens designated by the government as “journalists.” The First Amendment was written to avoid precisely that danger.
In a 1977 Supreme Court opinion documenting the limitless scope of the constitutional free press guarantee, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote: “In short, the First Amendment does not ‘belong’ to any definable category of persons or entities: It belongs to all who exercise its freedoms.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/05/28/indictment-assange-is-blueprint-making-journalists-into-felons/#comm
Mar 28th, 2024 - 10:25 am - Link - Report abuse -1
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