Time To Extradite Assange

Congratulations are in order to the Biden administration for winning the latest round in the quest to extradite Julian Assange to answer espionage charges here in the country in whose secrets he has allegedly been trafficking. Let’s hope Mr. Biden and his Justice Department hold firm in the face of special pleading from, among others, members of parliament in Mr. Assange’s home country of Australia. They want the case dropped.This follows the decision by a British high court court overturning a lower court’s refusal of America’s extradition request. The decision was handed down by the Chief Justice of England and Wales, the Lord Burnett of Maldon, and Lord Justice Holroyde. It’s nice to see someone in Britain prepared to accept America’s assurances that Mr. Assange would get a fair trial in our legal system.Mr. Assange for years has seemed nigh hysterical at the prospect of being tried in America, and it might well be that he is suffering badly. It has been dismaying to see that line of pleading win so much sympathy in Britain and elsewhere. It’s a mark of the seriousness of his offenses that one of the leakers to Wikileaks, Private Manning, at one point drew a sentence of 35 years in prison. It was commuted by President Obama.While seeking to avoid extradition to Sweden to answer a rape charge, Mr. Assange took refuge in Ecuador’s embassy at London. He skulked there until Ecuador finally got tired of him, and Mr. Assange was carried out of the embassy by British officers and put under arrest for jumping bail. America’s extradition campaign began in earnest, while Mr. Assange has been held behind bars.The thing that strikes us as most newsworthy in the appeal just decided is the rejection by the Lord Judges of the notion that America has been acting in bad faith. In the course of an opinion of nearly 100 paragraphs, they went through the question in detail, noting that the United States has even agreed that if Mr. Assange is convicted in an American court, he would be transferred to serve his sentence in Australia.“There is no reason why this court should not accept the assurances as meaning what they say,” the Lord Judges wrote at one point. “There is no basis for assuming that the USA has not given the assurances in good faith.” We don’t mind saying that it’s nice to hear that kind of language coming from a high court overseas. It is being reported that Mr. Assange intends a further appeal, but it’s hard to spot errors in the latest opinion.More broadly, we like to think of ourselves as a radical on the rights of newspaper proprietors under the First Amendment. We have received over the decades the occasional secret a government official thought fit to share. Yet we are horrified at the downloading onto a private server raw secrets on a scale that has been Wikileaks’ specialty. Americans deserve the chance to have this case heard in American courts.________Image: Detail of a photograph of Mr. Assange taken in 2014 by David G. Silvers, via Wikipedia and Flickr.

Time To Extradite Assange

Time To Extradite Assange

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