News: Julian Assange: Timeline of Wikileaks founder’s legal battles, page-4

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Doc Robinson

Participant

Assange “Q again: is this a full appeal?”

As explained by Craig Murray, an earlier judgement limited Assange’s potential appeals to extremely narrow grounds, which “explicitly gag the defence from ever mentioning again in court inconvenient facts, such as United States war crimes including murder, torture and extraordinary rendition, as well as the plans by the United States to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange.”

The latest judgement granted Assange’s right to appeal on the limited basis of “freedom of speech and discrimination by nationality” and affirmed that this “right to appeal applied to every count of the indictment”, but as Murray confirmed, “all of the other issues have fallen away and cannot be reintroduced”.

The potential danger of an appeal, the granting of which would achieve the United States’ objective of putting the actual extradition back beyond the election date, was that it would allow the airing in public of a great catalogue of war crimes and other illegal activity which had been exposed by Wikileaks.

Sharp and Johnson have obviated this danger by adjourning the decision with the possibility of granting an appeal, but only on extremely limited grounds. Those grounds would explicitly gag the defence from ever mentioning again in court inconvenient facts, such as United States war crimes including murder, torture and extraordinary rendition, as well as the plans by the United States to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange.

All of those things are precluded by this judgment from ever being raised again in the extradition hearings. The politically damaging aspect of the case in terms of the Manning revelations and CIA behaviour has been cauterised in the UK.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2024/03/the-assange-hearing-permission-appeal-judgment-mad-and-bad/

the right to appeal had been granted on grounds 4 and 5 of the applications – i.e. Freedom of Speech and Discrimination by Nationality. She also stated explicitly that the right to appeal applied to every count of the indictment, thus rejecting Lewis’s argument that some of the charges could not attract a freedom of speech defence.

The parties were given until 24 May to submit a joint memorandum on procedure and timetabling for the appeal hearing.

It is very important to understand that all of the other issues have fallen away and cannot be reintroduced. We are now down to the one narrow point on freedom of speech and discrimination by nationality.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2024/05/the-turning-of-the-tide/