Wikileaks founds Julian Assange is claiming that British courts are treating him worse than severe war criminals.
According to The Daily Telegraph [1]:
The founder of the Wikileaks whistleblowing website attacked the “gruelling bail conditions” imposed by British courts.
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“I had to wear a monitoring unit around my ankle. Alleged war criminals from the former Yugoslavia being held on bail here in Britain don’t have such conditions,” he told Der Spiegel, the German magazine.
Mr Assange has spent the past three years in the Ecuadorian Embassy in a bid to avoid extradition for questioning over sexual assault allegations to Sweden, after being granted diplomatic asylum [2].
He had been released on bail in 2010 on condition of £240,000 in cash and sureties, wearing an electronic tag and reporting to a police station everyday.
Mr Assange insists the claims of rape and sexual assault against two women are bogus, and fears they will lead to ultimately to the American courts. [3]
Wikileaks has continued to publish leaked cables, and Mr Assange said he expects its output to increase.
“We are drowning in material now. Economically, the challenge for WikiLeaks is whether we can scale up our income in proportion to the amount of material we have to process.” He likened the suspension of payments to Wikileaks to the US blockade of Cuba.
Mr Assange has not been charged with any crime, but there is an arrest warrant relating to the 2010 allegations. In May this year Sweden’s Supreme Court rejected Mr Assange’s attempt to lift the warrant.
Sweden’s extradition agreement with the United States was signed in October 1961 and updated in March 1983. It prohibits extradition on the basis of “a political offence” or “an offence connected with a political offence”.
But his supporters fear that he could be “snatched” by the CIA and spirited away to the US, regardless of the extradition treaty.
Mr Assange said the fate of Chelsea Manning, the source of Wikileaks cables who is now imprisoned in the United States for 35 years, has not made him more cautious. [4]
“The US government is pursuing five different types of charges against me. I don’t know how many charges altogether, but five types of charges: espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage, computer fraud and abuse, theft of secrets and general conspiracy.
“Even if there were only one charge of each type, which there wouldn’t be, that would be 45 years, and the Espionage Act has life imprisonment and death penalty provisions as well. So it would be absurd for me to worry about the consequences of our next publication.
“Saudi officials came out after we started publishing the Saudi cables and said that spreading and publishing government information carries a penalty of 20 years in prison. Only 20 years! So if it’s a choice between being extradited to Saudi Arabia or the US, then I should go to Saudi Arabia, a land famous for its judicial moderation.”
“The US is still proceeding against me and WikiLeaks more broadly according to a court filing by the US government this year. A “WikiLeaks War Room” was erected by the Pentagon and staffed with an admitted 120 US Intelligence and FBI officers. The center of it has moved from the Pentagon to the Justice Department, with the FBI continuing to provide “boots on the ground.”
“In their communications with Australian diplomats, US officials have said that it was an investigation of “unprecedented scale and nature” — over a dozen different US agencies ranging from the US State Department to the NSA have been involved.”
Sources:
