World media urge Biden to drop case against Julian Assange

Major news outlets, led by The New York Times, have called on the Biden administration to drop charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Assange, who is an Australian national imprisoned inside a British jail, is awaiting extradition to the US where he faces charges of espionage under a law designed to prosecute First World War spies.

The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El Pais joined forces with the NYT to oppose the charges against Assange, insisting that publishing the material WikiLeaks has released is not a crime. Obtaining and publishing sensitive information is a core part of the daily work of journalists, the outlets wrote on Monday.

On September 28, 2010, the five major news outlets collaborated to release excerpts from 250,000 documents obtained by Assange in the “Cablegate” leak. The material, leaked to WikiLeaks by the then-American soldier Chelsea Manning, exposed the inner workings of US diplomacy around the world.The editors and publishers of the five major news outlets that first published those revelations insisted that the prosecution of Assange is a direct attack on media freedom.

“This indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s first amendment and the freedom of the press,” they wrote. “Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists. If that work is criminalized, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker.”

“Twelve years after the publication of ‘Cablegate’, it is time for the US government to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets,” the letter concluded.

Since his arrest at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2019, Assange has been held in London's Belmarsh Prison. He had spent the previous seven years living inside the diplomatic premises to avoid arrest over now-dropped sex charges in Sweden. He was eventually arrested by British police for charges lodged at a British court for a case of alleged hacking of a government computer in the UK.

ME