Issued on: 29/10/2021 -
Supporters of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange protest outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, Britain, October 28, 2021. © Henry Nicholls, Reuters
Text by: NEWS WIRES
Lawyers for Julian Assange on Thursday dismissed US assurances about the treatment awaiting the WikiLeaks founder if he is extradited from Britain, as two days of hearings wrapped up in London.
Britain’s High Court said it would issue a ruling at a later date, after Washington appealed against a lower court’s decision to block Assange’s extradition to face a series of US charges related to the mass leak of classified documents.
“You’ve given us much to think about and we will take our time to make our decision,” said Ian Burnett, one of the two judges hearing the US appeal in the central London court.
Assange’s lawyers argued that he remains a suicide risk if extradited to the US, despite new assurances that he would not be held in punishing isolation at a “supermax” federal prison.
Mark Summers, representing Assange, argued there were “genuine questions” over the “trustworthiness” of the US pledges.
He said US intelligence agencies had an “obsession” with Assange.
Recent reports that the CIA had hatched a prior plot to kidnap Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and poison him were “potentially the tip of the iceberg”, Summers said.
Long process
The US government wants Assange to face espionage charges that could put him in jail for up to 175 years, although its legal team claims his possible sentence is difficult to estimate and could be far shorter.
It is appealing against UK district court judge Vanessa Baraitser’s decision in January that it would be “oppressive” to extradite Assange because of his serious risk of suicide and mental health deterioration.
She rejected US experts’ testimony that Assange would be protected from self-harm, noting that others such as disgraced US financier Jeffrey Epstein had killed themselves in custody.
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Whatever the High Court decides, the legal fight is likely to drag on for months if not years.
If the US appeal is successful, the case will be sent back to the lower court for a new decision, while whoever loses can also ask for permission for a further, final appeal to the UK’s Supreme Court.
Assange chose not to appear Thursday after following some of Wednesday’s proceedings via video-link from the high-security Belmarsh jail in southeast London where he is being held.
His partner Stella Moris, with whom he has two children, was present inside the courtroom as dozens of supporters rallied outside.
Australian national Assange, 50, was arrested in Britain in 2019 for jumping bail, after spending seven years inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden where he faced allegations of sexual assault. These were later dropped.
The US government has indicted him on 18 charges relating to WikiLeaks’ 2010 release of 500,000 secret files detailing aspects of military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He is accused of violating the US espionage act and hacking, based on the alleged aid he gave former military intelligence officer Chelsea Manning in obtaining the documents from secure computer systems.
Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing former leader of Britain’s Labour party, said outside the court that Assange had “told us the truth, the truth about Afghanistan, the truth about Iraq, the truth about surveillance”.
‘Solemn matter’
James Lewis, lawyer for the US government, said in its appeal that Washington had now provided written pledges Assange would not be detained at the ADX Florence jail in Colorado, which houses criminals including Al-Qaeda extremists in near-total isolation.
He would also receive any psychological treatment recommended, and eventually be eligible to apply for a prisoner transfer to his native Australia.
“Diplomatic assurances are a solemn matter,” Lewis said. “These are not dished out like smarties.”
He also sought to undermine Baraitser’s ruling, arguing Assange “had every reason to exaggerate” his mental health issues and that its own experts had found he was only “moderately depressed”.
The lawyer also insisted Michael Kopelman, a key psychiatric expert provided by Assange’s team, had offered a “misleading” initial report which deliberately omitted that Assange had secretly fathered two children with Moris in recent years.
(AFP)
Accusing the CIA of having an “obsession for vengeance” against Julian Assange, a lawyer for the WikiLeaks founder urged a British court on Thursday to conduct an independent investigation into the agency’s aggressive measures targeting his client, including an aborted 2017 plot to abduct him from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London that was detailed in a recent report by Yahoo News.
“This is a case of credible evidence of U.S. government plans developed at some length to do serious harm to Mr. Assange,” said Mark Summers, a lawyer for Assange. He spoke on the second day of a two-day hearing before a British appeals court on whether the WikiLeaks founder should be extradited to the United States to face trial for publishing classified documents in violation of the World War I-era Espionage Act.
U.S. government officials have consistently declined to comment on the recent Yahoo News story detailing a CIA plan to abduct Assange — as well as internal discussions within the Trump administration and the agency about the feasibility of assassinating him — after WikiLeaks published documents describing the spy agency’s highly sensitive “Vault 7” documents on how it conducts offensive cyber operations against U.S. adversaries.
But Summers, after reading at length from the Yahoo News story, noted that then-CIA Director and future Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — who pushed the agency to develop the plans targeting Assange — has publicly said that “pieces of it are true.” (Pompeo, in a recent podcast interview, also said that more than 30 former U.S. officials who spoke to Yahoo News should be criminally prosecuted for disclosing classified information.)
Summers added that “there is going to have to be some assessment” of the reports about the CIA’s conduct as well as apparently related evidence developed by a Spanish judicial investigation into a security company that allegedly helped the CIA spy on Assange. He argued that the Yahoo News story and the Spanish probe buttress allegations that the CIA “plotted assassination, kidnapping and poisoning” of Assange.
It remains unclear whether the British court will ask Biden administration officials to address the reports of the CIA’s conduct, almost all of which took place during the early years of Donald Trump’s presidency, when Pompeo served as the agency’s director. And James Lewis, the British barrister representing the U.S. government in the case, did not address any of the assertions about the CIA made by Summers.
One of the three British judges said it would not be surprising if, given Assange’s history, the CIA was “intensely interested” in him. But that prompted Summers to respond that the CIA’s conduct went well beyond maintaining an interest in the WikiLeaks founder. Pointing to the Yahoo News account, Summers said: “I invite my lords to read it in due course to get a proper understanding of what lengths the CIA has been prepared to go to in relation to Mr. Assange.”
Technically, the issue before the court is a ruling earlier this year by a lower-court judge, Vanessa Baraitser, denying the U.S. request to extradite Assange on the grounds that sending him to the United States to face trial would put him at serious risk of suicide. Although Assange was indicted by the Justice Department under Trump, the Biden administration — despite criticism from some civil liberties and press freedom groups — has continued the case and appealed Baraitser’s denial to the British High Court.
On Wednesday, during the first day of the High Court hearing, another of Assange’s lawyers argued that the risk of suicide is real given that Assange suffers from an Asperger's-like mental disorder and would likely be held under harsh prison conditions in the United States that would include solitary confinement.
But Lewis, the lawyer for the U.S. government, argued that that risk has been seriously reduced in light of recent assurances provided by U.S. officials, including an affidavit by the chief U.S. prosecutor in the case, Gordon Kromberg, that Assange will not be subjected to some of those harsh conditions, known as “special administrative measures” (or SAMs), nor will he be sentenced, if convicted, to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons maximum security facility in Florence, Colo. Instead, Kromberg wrote, Assange will be permitted to request a transfer that would allow him to serve out his sentence in a prison in his native Australia.
Lewis contended that these assurances undercut the basis for Baraitser’s denial of the U.S. extradition request, stressing that the U.S. assurances can be relied on by the court. “The United States has never broken a diplomatic assurance — ever,” he said.
But Summers argued that there were plenty of holes in Kromberg’s affidavits to the British court detailing those assurances. For openers, he contended that once Assange is sent to the U.S., he will be held under restrictive conditions in an Alexandria, Va., jail while awaiting trial — a period that Summers contended could drag on for years, given the extensive pretrial motions and discovery that are likely to take place in the case. He also noted that even Kromberg acknowledged that Assange could still be subjected to special administrative measures upon the recommendation of the attorney general if the FBI or members of the U.S. intelligence community determine he is engaging in conduct that endangers national security, such as continuing to disclose classified documents still in possession of WikiLeaks. That makes the disclosures about the CIA’s conduct relevant and deserving of investigation, Summers argued.
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