Assange Affair: Is Information a Human Right?

Julian Assange believes — as the U.N. establishes — that freedom of expression is a human right, as is the right to true and complete information.

For this reason, he shared thousands of Pentagon documents with the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and La Jornada that have accounted for the manners and customs of international politics and its “collateral damage” — as shown by the video of the crew of an Apache artillery helicopter on the hunt massacring children and a pair of Associated Press journalists in the Middle East.*

Some minimized Assange’s revelations on the WikiLeaks homepage when they began to circulate throughout the world. They said that all this was already known, that they were simply trivialities. But trivial or not they circulated extensively everywhere.

Others, like the writer Mario Vargas Llosa, said that it was not liberty but rather debauchery that the Australian journalist was practicing, and that this debauchery was risking the lives of intelligence agents around the world.

Others still have criticized his attempt to seek refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London because of the not-very-good record of the Ecuadorian leader with some of his country’s newspapers. In what embassy should he [Assange] have sought refuge? In what country does a healthy and full relationship with the local press exist so as to opt for its embassy instead?

If London does not grant safe passage to Julian Assange to so that he can fly to Ecuador the activist will have more than enough reason to doubt the good offices of British justice.

Wasn’t it the same British judicial apparatus that tried the newspaper reporter Robert Fisk for his coverage in the Middle East? They tried him and, incidentally, Fisk won. But the case of the contributing journalist for The Independent and La Jornada and that of the Australian editor are different. Fisk neither lost his freedom nor ran the risk of being extradited to another country.

Perhaps the British only wanted to collaborate with their ally the U.S., in order to extradite Assange to Sweden so that from there he can be carried to U.S. tribunals.

It must be remembered that Bradley Manning, who leaked the WikiLeaks documents to Julian Assange, is currently being held prisoner on a military base.

Manning, after eight months of confinement, still does not have the prospect of a trial. And this could happen to Assange in the U.S. — or something worse: If he is charged with espionage and treason he could be sentenced to death.

If the Swedish Prime Minister Frederik Reinfeldt has publicly considered Julian Assange guilty, what guarantees that his potential Swedish judges have not become sensitized along the same lines? Another journalist, Stieg Larsson, has demonstrated with numerous articles and the tremendous Millennium saga that there is something rotten in the state of Sweden when it comes to the judicial system.

Assange and his representative, Judge Baltasar Garzon, have well-founded reasons to suspect that the life of the WikiLeaks director is in danger. And the two are knowledgeable in that respect: Assange through the thousands of documents to which he had access and Garzon because the spirit of Francisco Franco prevented him from practicing law in Spain. His fight against Pinochet served for nothing. The spirit of Franco and his followers ended up throwing the book at him, so it appears that those attacking the judge are the same as those attacking his client.

Will the Assange case arrive at the court in The Hague through the British government’s refusal to grant safe passage? Will the British government invade the Ecuadorian embassy? Will the Swedish government guarantee that it will not extradite Julian Assange if he allows himself to be judged in its territory? If this occurs, will the U.S. government request his extradition? Will Assange then make good on his threat to “open up the floodgates” by publicizing a 1.3 GB encrypted file containing secret documents even more incendiary and compromising than those already known?

Judge Garzon says that Assange knows that he he is in the right. Certainly, but it is not enough. For hardliners everywhere the point is not to prevail on others but rather to prevail over them. The rest is not important.

*Editor’s note: The Apache helicopter crew killed two employees of Reuters, not of the Associated Press.