Today, Julian Assange will appear at the High Court in London to appeal his extradition to the US, after being held in the Belmarsh prison for five years. If he loses his appeal, he’ll be incarcerated in a high-security prison in the US, waiting to be tried.

Assange exposed the US government’s war crimes, corruption and misconduct in Iraq and Afghanistan. He now faces 175 years in prison under the Espionage Act, which for the first time is being employed to bring charges against a journalist and publisher who is not a US citizen and whose publications appeared in the UK.

This prosecution represents an extraordinary breach of protected speech, infringing upon the freedom of expression outlined in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). In his testimony at the Belmarsh Tribunal in Washington, DC, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer Ben Wizner asked, ‘Does this [Biden] administration want to be the first to establish the global precedent that countries can demand the extradition of foreign reporters and publishers for violating their own laws?.’ 

Moreover, the US has stated that Assange would be denied free speech protections during the trial on the grounds that he is not a US citizen, prejudicing his position as a defendant. Therefore, if extradited to a federal court in the US, Assange’s lawyers would have limited defense, while incarceration in a high-security prison in the US is akin to a death sentence.

Persecuting Assange for his courage to expose war crimes is a grave miscarriage of justice and a threat to freedom of the press, instituting a dangerous model for the treatment of journalists and publishers.

(C) The Progressive International Secretariat