Wikileaks journalist remains imprisoned as US continues to pursue discredited extradition case – and refusal to give binding guarantee would result in his immediate release if UK justice system was fit for purpose

The US has refused to give a specific, binding guarantee to a UK court that it will not execute journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Assange has been held for years in solitary confinement in Belmarsh prison while he fights the US government’s attempt to extradite him so it can imprison him for years beyond his lifespan, after Assange exposed war crimes in Iraq by the US military.

The case should have been laughed out of court three years ago, when the main US witness admitted he had been lying all along in his claim that Assange induced him to hack US systems. Instead, Assange has been submitted to what former UN Special Rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer described as sustained psychological torture – and still faces the likelihood of imprisonment for more than a century.

His recent appeal was adjourned to give the US time to affirm properly that it would not kill him if he was extradited, a sick joke when there has been longstanding evidence of US plans to murder him outside the US.

Incredibly, the High Court has refused to admit fresh evidence of CIA plots to kidnap or kill Julian Assange.

The judges say the rationale for kidnapping or killing Assange would be removed if he is extradited, and the evidence is thus not worth consideration.

Read that again. pic.twitter.com/PqwJIg4yAn

— Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) March 26, 2024

The judges even refused to admit fresh evidence of the US’s plans to assassinate Assange, instead offering the US another opportunity to have him in their hands if they would promise not to put him to death. The US.

But Assange’s wife Stella has revealed that the US has refused to say that it will not kill him and has offered only a boilerplate statement about the death penalty, while denying Assange the free speech protections it would offer to any US citizen:

The United States has issued a non-assurance in relation to the First Amendment, and a standard assurance in relation to the death penalty.

It makes no undertaking to withdraw the prosecution’s previous assertion that Julian has no First Amendment rights because he is not a U.S citizen. Instead, the US has limited itself to blatant weasel words claiming that Julian can “seek to raise” the First Amendment if extradited.

The diplomatic note does nothing to relieve our family’s extreme distress about his future – his grim expectation of spending the rest of his life in isolation in US prison for publishing award-winning journalism.

The Biden Administration must drop this dangerous prosecution before it is too late.

The US statement says the death penalty will be ‘neither sought nor imposed’, but this is non-binding and meaningless given its previous attempts to kill him. The refusal to guarantee there will be no death penalty in Assange’s specific case should mean under UK and European human rights laws that the extradition is immediately refused by the UK court and Assange should already be free. Even if the assurances had been given, the likelihood that the US’s treatment of Assange would lead to his death should be enough to quash the bid.

The fact that he is not yet free of the threat of extradition, let alone walking around in the freedom he should have, is a damning indictment of the state of UK justice and democracy.

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