For Julian Assange, the wait continues. The pause can be counted as a small victory in the long battle to fight his extradition to the United States. But it is one of the many shameful issues in this most shameful of sagas that his waiting room is a cell in a high security prison where he has been held for the past five years, despite having been convicted of nothing.
The high court decision issued by Dame Victoria Sharp and Mr Justice Johnson means that the US has been given a short time to offer “assurances” as to how his trial would be conducted and that the death penalty would not be imposed. Astonishingly it has previously been unable to provide them. Assange’s defence team will then be allowed to challenge those “assurances” issued by a country with a long record of ignoring many of the basic rights of anyone deemed to be threatening the security of the state in any way.
It is almost exactly a year since the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Russia on espionage charges. He will face up to 20 years in prison if convicted. There have been negotiations between the two governments over the possibility of a prisoner swap. Both of his parents attended Joe Biden’s State of the Union address this month, at which the president said that the administration was “working around the clock to bring home Evan”. His father, Mikhail Gershkovich, said the address was a sign that “everybody in the US government – the Senate and Congress and the White House – are taking the freedom of the press seriously, and that’s important”.
It is important, but it is also hypocritical of the US to plead for Gershkovich’s release after he has spent a year in jail, while seeking to extradite and lock up Assange and simultaneously boast about a commitment to freedom of the press.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US was considering a plea deal offer that would allow Assange to admit to a misdemeanour rather than the more serious charges he now faces under the Espionage Act. Supposedly, if he pleaded guilty to the lesser charges of mishandling classified documents, he would be allowed to enter a plea remotely from London and would be freed shortly afterwards on the basis that he had already served five years in custody. But Assange’s lawyers have not yet heard anything of such a deal.
The next three weeks will show us whether real discussions are taking place in Washington about freedom of the press, or whether they still imagine that hoisting Assange to jail is worth the ridicule of the world. When it emerged earlier this year that the US had been trying to persuade British and American journalists who had had differences of opinion with Assange to give evidence against him, it became clear just how weak and grotesque its case was against him.
“This legally unprecedented prosecution seeks to criminalise the application of ordinary journalistic practices of obtaining and publishing true classified information of the most obvious and important public interest,” was how Edward Fitzgerald KC put the case for Assange at last month’s hearing. The battle against that prosecution continues, and only the unconditional release of Assange will demonstrate that both the UK and the US regard “freedom of the press” as something to be honoured – rather than merely a phrase of sanctimonious waffle.
Duncan Campbell is a freelance writer who worked for the Guardian as crime correspondent and Los Angeles correspondent
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