02 Jul 24 | Ecuador, News and features, United Kingdom
Index on Censorship has had a close relationship with Julian Assange since he picked up our new media award in 2008 for his work with Wikileaks due to our shared concern for freedom of expression. We were therefore pleased to hear the news that he was finally able to be reunited with his family in Australia after five years in London’s Belmarsh Prison and seven years in hiding at the Ecuadorian embassy (pictured above). At a court in the US Pacific island territory of Saipan, Assange pleaded guilty to a single charge of violating the US Espionage Act. He admitted conspiring to obtain and disclose classified defence documents. Time will tell what chilling effect the deal struck between Assange’s lawyers and the American government will have on journalists attempting to expose future wrongdoing by the US military and intelligence services.
The British courts may have played a decisive role by insisting that Assange’s free expression rights be taken into account during the extradition hearings. But there was a sense that by the end of the proceedings that both sides were exhausted. As Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona said as she announced the agreement: “I hope there will be some peace restored.” For free expression organisations such as Index, the dominant emotion is relief that this saga is finally over.
The unstinting support of our colleagues at Reporters Without Borders has been instrumental in keeping the case in the public eye. But the wider Free Assange campaign has, at times, been a huge distraction. The campaign allowed a whole range of wider questions to arise which were nothing to do with free speech. Was the Wikileaks founder a journalist, an activist or a publisher, for example?
Julian Assange has established his place in history as one of the most significant figures in 21st century journalism. The sheer scale of the leak of US diplomatic cables he helped facilitate forced rival journalists to work together. But it also made governments determined to stop it happening again. New measures in the UK’s new National Security Act, for example, were specifically designed to “modernise” official secrecy legislation in response to Wikileaks-style data dumps. At the same time, authoritarian regimes could always hold up Assange as an example of western hypocrisy when challenged on their human rights records.
The reality is that although the Assange campaign has redefined the way the free speech world works, it has also sucked lots of the air out of it. Julian and Stella Assange have asked for the space to build a life for themselves and their children in Australia. This is their victory. But let us hope that for those of us who care about free expression, the focus can now switch fully to other egregious cases around the world.
In a terrible coincidence, the release of Assange coincided with the beginning of the espionage trial of Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter arrested in March 2023 shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It also coincided with the case of Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai reaching the highest court of appeal. Lai stands accused of joining an illegal protest in 2019. Next month his trial resumes under separate national security charges.
While we’ve poured energy into campaigning for the release of Assange, there has been a race to the bottom elsewhere in the world. Reporters accused of subversion are held without trial in China’s “black jails”, while hundreds of Uyghur journalists have been imprisoned in the re-education camps of Xinjiang. Russia’s independent media has been eviscerated and President Lukashenka has rounded up any opposition voices in Belarus. The use of anti-terrorist or national security legislation to control journalists has become commonplace in Turkey, in Egypt, in India and across the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.
It would be good to think that the energy of the Free Assange campaign could now be harnessed in support of Gershkovich, Lai and the many brave journalists around the world held as spies or subversives whose names we don’t even know.
26 Mar 24 | News and features, United Kingdom, United States, Volume 53.01 Spring 2024
I first met Julian Assange before he was Julian Assange. Or rather, when he was just becoming Julian Assange. For a few short months our fates were intertwined. And it all started with Index on Censorship.
In 2008, when I was political editor of the New Statesman, I was asked to collect an Index on Censorship New Media award on behalf of WikiLeaks, the organisation Assange founded two years earlier. I duly turned up for the event and was told the man himself had appeared at the caterers’ entrance at the last-minute and my services would not be required. Secretive and not a little melodramatic, I soon discovered this was the way Assange liked to do business. The speech was impressive, expressing how much Assange valued solidarity and his admiration for “syndicalism”, the belief that direct action can drive political change.
I wrote about that evening in my New Statesman blog and Assange noticed another item, where I discussed the newly aggressive approach the law firm Carter Ruck was taking with one of its clients, Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi billionaire convicted of fraud in France as part of the giant Elf-Aquitaine scandal. Mr Auchi continues to deny the charges. Newspapers who had written about Auchi’s business dealings were being threatened with legal action if they didn’t remove articles from their websites. Most of them eventually complied rather than face steep legal bills. Assange acted quickly to hoover up everything he could about Auchi and published it on WikiLeaks. It was a bold move because Carter Ruck were playing hardball. When I published a link to the Auchi files on my blog, the law firm threatened to sue the New Statesman.
I recently came across an email from Assange which he sent in November 2008, when he found out the New Statesman was planning to cave. He condemned the magazine for removing the original blogpost and objected to plans to issue a statement saying the articles collected by WikiLeaks (and published by respected journalists in national newspapers) contained significant inaccuracies. He pointed out that this action would in itself be defamatory.
This was solidarity and syndicalism, Assange-style. The New Statesman decided to settle with the billionaire, and I soon parted company with the magazine.
A few months later, a WikiLeaks emissary walked into the offices of a charity I had set up to help young people break into the creative industries on London’s Southbank. He showed me footage of the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which two Reuters journalists and several civilians were killed by a missile from a US helicopter. After a few further discussions, I advised him to talk to major news outlets about this extraordinary story. Shortly after this, WikiLeaks (in collaboration with The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El Pais) began publishing the US diplomatic cables that made Assange’s reputation. It was a new, collaborative way of doing journalism that challenged the way the United States conducted foreign policy. Solidarity and syndicalism in action, perhaps.
We live in different times and Julian Assange finds himself in Belmarsh high-security prison awaiting the result of his final appeal against extradition to the United States, where he faces trial under the Espionage Act. In the interim, he has become a highly divisive figure and much of the solidarity from his former journalistic collaborators has evaporated. He has made serious errors of judgment and attracted some unfortunate allies. His radar for what constitutes genuine dissent has always been questionable. As former Index journalist Padraig Reidy pointed out in an important piece on Assange in BuzzFeed News in 2019: “Assange’s definition of ‘power’ and ‘elite’ often stretched only as far as Western governments and their allies.” Over the years, it has sometimes seemed that the principles of solidarity only worked in one direction. With each new twist in the story, a new layer of support dropped away. When Assange jumped bail and found refuge in London’s Ecuadorian embassy, when he published hacked emails from Hilary Clinton’s 2016 election campaign, when he suggested he was the victim of a conspiracy of Jewish journalists and was found to have employed a Holocaust denier, this all contributed to the picture of Assange as a narcissistic, paranoid self-publicist whose path was littered with the collateral damage of his overblown ego.
The question is whether it is possible to set all this aside and look at the bigger picture or if Assange’s flaws and failings are an integral part of the bigger picture. Meanwhile, those journalists who have worked with him over the years need to ask themselves if his present predicament as a prisoner in the UK’s highest security prison is just desserts or a travesty of justice.
The French free expression organisation, Reporters Without Borders, which has been consistent in its support for Assange, published a useful list of common misconceptions in the Assange case: that he is a traitor to the United States (he is Australian), that he leaked classified information (he published it), that he knowingly put people at risk (the prosecution has struggled to prove harm). But most powerful is the misconception that if he is convicted this will have no wider effect. There is already ample evidence that governments are determined to deter journalists from ever working with the likes of Assange again. The new UK National Security Act has specific measures to increase sentences for journalists working on data leak stories involving official secrets. Add to this the use of the US Espionage Act. Assange would be the first publisher tried under this act and if convicted he might not be the last.
Julian Assange is so wrong about so much. He has made many terrible mistakes. He is, in some ways, the agent of his own misfortune. But he taught journalists that some stories are so important that they need international collaboration to put them into the public domain. He was not wrong about the importance of solidarity.
11 Mar 24 | News and features, United Kingdom, United States
As Julian Assange awaits the verdict of his final court appeal against his extradition to the USA, where he faces a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison under the Espionage Act for publishing classified information, those on the outside are determined not to give up the fight to free him.
The Trust Fall: Julian Assange – which will be released at cinemas this Friday – follows the Australian publisher and activist through his lifelong pursuit of truth. The film explores Assange’s life through archive footage and recollections of those who know him, focussing on his work on WikiLeaks and the years he has spent in isolation both in London’s Ecuadorian embassy and Belmarsh Prison. Director Kym Staton told Index that although his initial mission was to raise awareness of Assange’s plight through the documentary, the reception it has garnered during early screenings has made him optimistic that real weight can be added to the campaign for his freedom.
“We worked really hard to make something that was emotional and powerful and that would help people make sense of [Assange’s] situation. It’s going so well and getting such a great reception, fantastic ratings,” said Staton. “It’s given me a lot of hope that perhaps we can do more than we thought and it might even be a part of this battle to secure Assange’s freedom.”
In the documentary’s most harrowing scene, the infamous Collateral Murder video published by Assange on his WikiLeaks site is played out in full. The footage shows a helicopter attack by the US military in Iraq in 2007, in which 11 civilians, including two Reuters journalists, were shot and killed. Soldiers can be heard laughing in the background of the video as bullets rain down on those on the ground. It’s a difficult watch, but Staton says it was essential for the footage to be included in the documentary in order to drive home Assange’s motivations.
“It’s such a powerful video and there’s nothing else that has ever been seen like it. The impact of that footage is so great it just had to be part of the film,” he said. “To show it to people for the first time on the big screen is such a great opportunity.”
“To witness people’s reaction in cinemas, to look down the aisle and see people crying watching it, it just shows us that it was a good choice,” Staton continued. “I really feel that we can’t achieve change unless people feel something on a hard level. If they don’t feel upset or cry, they may not be compelled to do anything.”
The director also notes that although the Iraq War Logs, of which the Collateral Murder video is part, is the basis of the case against Assange, the US government failed to include this particular video in their indictment, which Staton says is due to it being ”embarrassing” for the state.
The documentary drives home the importance of Assange’s case, which will have huge implications for the future of journalism. One particular concern for Staton is that these charges are being levelled at a journalist for his work in a country purporting to have a free press, which is indicative of the way in which western states tend to fly under the radar when it comes to eroding media freedom due to their reputation for liberal democracy.
“World leaders in the west – in America, Australia, the UK and other countries – they love to give these gallant speeches about free speech and about protecting journalists while on the other hand they’re bringing in all kinds of scary laws,” he said.
“It’s not so much about hate speech, it’s about clamping down on the dissemination of truth.”
The director also said the mere existence of Assange’s case was setting a “shocking and scary” precedent.
“To have an Australian journalist charged under a US law for journalistic work is just a huge injustice, a huge travesty. It’s absolutely obscene,” he said. “If things worsen and he’s put on trial in America and tortured over there, goodness knows what’s in the future for everybody. How are we ever going to have access to truthful information?”
Assange is yet to learn his fate following his appeal, but most routes to freedom have already been exhausted. Because of this, Staton said it was more important than ever to spread awareness about his cause. The director said the film only spent three months in the festival circuit as he wanted to make sure the documentary could be seen by more people as soon as it was ready.
“It just would’ve taken too long and it just wasn’t appropriate when we had a largely crowd-funded documentary to slow down the process to win awards,” he explained.
He is also conscious of the desperation of Assange’s situation on a personal level. During the production stage, Staton read Nils Melzer’s book The Trial of Julian Assange, which included some shocking details that are recreated in the documentary using animation.
“During a prison cell search they discovered [Assange] had hidden a razor blade in his cell so that if he was extradited he could take control of the situation and take his own life. When I read that I was floored. I put the book down and I just sat there,” he said.
Such details humanise the story of Assange, who can often be overlooked due to the wider importance of his case. The documentary shows that not only does this case matter due to the implications it has on the future of media freedom, but that Assange is a real person who has been imprisoned for journalistic work. He deserves to be freed.
The Trust Fall: Julian Assange is released in UK cinemas on 15 March
20 Feb 24 | News and features, Statements, United States
Julian Assange; illustration: Hafteh7
Today, as a panel of High Court judges convene the last stage of UK proceedings in the US government’s extradition case against Assange, we reiterate our urgent calls to free Julian Assange. This week’s hearing marks the beginning of the end of his extradition case, as there can be no further appeal in the UK.
Not only will extradition put Assange at risk, given his mental health, but it will inevitably have a serious chilling effect on media freedom around the world. We fear that he will not face a fair trial in the United States given the hostile publicity around the case.
Wikileaks published a series of leaked diplomatic cables in 2010 and 2011, which caused serious embarrassment to the United States government. These included the US army manual on the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and a video showing a helicopter attack on innocent civilians in Iraq. Assange acted as a journalist and publisher in bringing these disclosures to public attention. He did so in collaboration with a number of mainstream, respected media organisations including the Guardian and the New York Times.
We call on the international community to support Assange in this, the final stage of his battle against extradition. If the US government succeeds in bringing espionage charges against Assange it will have the potential effect of turning all journalists reporting on alleged US security abuses into spies.
