Assange extradition decision due January 4: Mobilise the working class to secure his freedom!

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange [Credit: AP Photo/Matt Dunham]

Thomas Scripps-30 December 2020

The UK courts will decide on Monday January 4 whether WikiLeaks founder and journalist Julian Assange should be extradited to the United States. He faces a life sentence on charges under the Espionage Act for exposing war crimes and coup plots, torture and other human rights abuses, state corruption and spying.

A decision to extradite is all but assured. The hearing was a pseudo-legal travesty which saw Assange’s basic democratic rights trampled. Presiding district judge Vanessa Baraitser has treated Assange with undisguised hostility throughout the proceedings. Her supervisor, Lady Emma Arbuthnot, is married to a government figure named personally in the WikiLeaks exposures.

A decision either way will be met with an appeal, leading to months or even years more legal battles. All the while, Assange will be kept imprisoned in Belmarsh maximum security prison in London, at grave risk to his life.

Monday’s hearing nevertheless marks an important new stage in the decade-long persecution of the most significant journalist of the twenty-first century.

Assange’s legal team have torn to shreds the frame-up mounted against him by the US government. They have demonstrated that US prosecutors have fundamentally misrepresented the facts of the case, that the US Justice Department has not proceeded in good faith, and that they are seeking extradition for a political offence—barred under the Anglo-US Extradition Treaty.

They have shown how the request breaks statutory bars against extraditing anyone at risk of being punished “on account of his… political opinions” or discriminated against during legal proceedings because of those opinions, or anyone whose extradition would be “unjust and oppressive” on medical grounds. The extradition request threatens to violate Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to freedom of expression; Article 7, the right against retroactive criminalisation; Article 6, the right to a fair trial; and Article 3, the right against inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

This demolition of the prosecution’s arguments has stripped bare the social interests behind Assange’s vindictive treatment. He is being made an example of by the US and allied states to terrorise opposition to war and dictatorship, on behalf of their predatory ruling classes. His extradition hearing is a show trial organised to deliver a predetermined decision on a class war prisoner.

These social forces will not relent until they are made to, out of fear of a global mass movement for the WikiLeaks’ founder’s freedom.

There is a wellspring of popular support for Assange. WikiLeaks is celebrated by millions for having struck a blow against the brutal activities of American imperialism and its allies, including the UK. Assange’s case is also understood as setting a precedent for a further assault on journalism and democratic rights.

Over 1,600 journalists in 99 countries have signed their names to an open letter demanding Assange’s freedom. The letter’s publication in December 2019 followed the establishment of the Doctors for Assange group one month earlier, bringing together medical professionals outraged at Assange’s mistreatment. A Lawyers for Assange and an Artists for Assange group were founded earlier this year.

However, the social force capable of securing Assange’s freedom and defending democratic rights, the international working class, has yet to be organised in his support.

Building the necessary campaign in the working class requires a political reckoning with the forces that have worked to isolate Assange. These include the media and civil rights organisations of the petty-bourgeois “liberal” fraternity, the pseudo-left and the trade union and Labour bureaucracy.

In its earlier years, WikiLeaks worked with newspapers and magazines like the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El Pais to publish its releases. From the beginning, these organisations sought to control the political fallout from the unprecedented exposures—profiting from the scoop along the way.

When Assange refused to retreat from the public’s right to know and threatened to upset their cosy relationships with their respective ruling classes, they stabbed him in the back. WikiLeaks’ former “media partners” launched a systematic campaign to demonise Assange, promoting a manufactured Swedish sexual assault investigation and fabricated stories of collusion with the Russian state.

Pseudo-left organisations like the Socialist Workers Party in the UK and the International Socialist Organisation in the US, whose support for imperialist interventions under the fraudulent banner of “human rights” was threatened by the WikiLeaks revelations, joined the crusade. Their affluent middle-class constituency, steeped in identity politics, was only too happy to support Sweden’s trumped-up insinuations of sexual assault.

The Labour Party “left” and trade union bureaucracy maintained a complicit silence throughout. Only in April 2019 did then Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn publicly oppose Assange’s extradition to the US, before stating less than 48 hours later that his fate was “a matter for the courts.” Corbyn kept silent on Assange’s case throughout the December 2019 general election. Since being replaced as leader of the Labour Party, he has intermittently called on the British judiciary and Prime Minister Boris Johnson to block Assange’s extradition.