Lawyer Monthly - January 2022 Edition

A late inclusion in this round-up, the case of Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange and two governments’ attempts to have him extradited has been evolving gradually over more than a decade and saw some significant movement this year. Assange became a household name in 2010 after Wikileaks published a series of leaks by former US Army soldier Chelsea Manning about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars alongside the release of more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables that would come to be known as Cablegate. Following this event, which would result in Manning’s arrest and conviction on charges including espionage, an arrest warrant was issued for Assange for two separate sexual assault allegations in Sweden. After denying the allegations to Swedish police he returned to the UK and was granted bail. After a legal battle resulted in a court ruling that Assange should be extradited to Sweden – which he feared would lead to his extradition to the US, where he could face charges over the publication of government files – he sought sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy, where he would remain for seven years until his eventual eviction and arrest by the Metropolitan Police in 2019. The sexual assault charges against Assange have since been dropped, but the charges levied against him by the US Department of Justice have been revealed to include 17 counts of espionage and one instance of computer misuse, wherein he is alleged to have conspired with Manning to crack a password on a Department of Defence computer. Should he be convicted on all counts, Assange will face a maximum possible penalty of 175 years in prison. The outcome of this case and its significance are the subject of sore debate. Assange describes himself as a political refugee and other whistleblowers have argued that his US case could set a precedent with dire implications for press freedoms and First Amendment rights. Meanwhile, detractors have argued that the publication of illegally obtained information without redacting named individuals is dangerous and should not be counted as journalism. In a decision on 10 December, the UK High Court ruled that Assange can be extradited back to the US after receiving a raft of reassurances from the US government that he would not be subject to “special administrative measures” and that he could, if convicted, apply to be transferred to a prison in Australia, his country of origin. Assange’s lawyers have since launched an appeal to the Supreme Court, though expert consensus holds that this is unlikely to succeed. We will remain poised to see the new direction this long-running case takes, whether that will be in the UK or the US. The Extradition Case of Julian Assange 15 WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM Julian Assange Credit: David G. Silvers, Cancillería del Ecuador (https://creativecommons.org licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en)