A minister who mixes espionage with journalism will decide whether to extradite Assange to the United States


  • Priti Patel, secretary of the Home Office (Interior) of the Government of Boris Johnson, is preparing an official secrets law that will increase prison sentences for leaks from the intelligence services from 2 to 14 years

Priti Sushi Patel (London, United Kingdom, 1972) will decide within 60 days whether or not to extradite journalist Julian Assange (Townsville, Australia, 1971), director of wikileaks, To united states. An economist, leader of the British Conservative Party, Patel was appointed Secretary for International Development by Prime Minister Teresa May in 2016 and was forced to resign in 2017 due to the scandal of her 14 secret meetings with ministers, businessmen and members of pressure groups in Israel, among them, and without informing the prime minister, with the then prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahuin August of that year.

During that trip, he visited a military hospital in the Golan Heights, the 1,800 square kilometer plateau between Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria occupied by Israel (1,200 square kilometres) in the 1967 Six-Day War, a region that the United Kingdom considered illegally annexed. Patel finally acknowledged that he had violated the “transparency rules” in his resignation letter after a first reaction in which he had justified himself with the argument that the then Secretary of State of the Foreign Office (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) knew about the visits and encounters of him. The secretary at that time was Boris Johnson. She then was forced to clarify that Johnson knew after the meetings, not before, as appropriate. In July 2019, the new Prime Minister Boris Johnson appointed Patel Secretary of the Home Office when forming his government.

Patel has promoted tougher penalties for leaking information considered classified

We are in London. It is April 11, 2019. British police arrest Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy, ​​where she has taken refuge for seven years. The British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, sends the following message on his Twitter account: “It is fair that Julian Assange finally faces justice. Solvency of the Foreign Office officials who have worked tirelessly to ensure this outcome.”

Last Wednesday, April 20, then, the last formal act of British justice took place in the Westminster Magistrate’s Court after the Supreme Court denied, on March 14, authorization for Assange’s defense to appeal the decision of the High Court of England and Wales (High Court of Just of Justice) last December by which the journalist can be extradited to the United States.

The chief magistrate of the aforementioned London court, Paul Goldspring, in the classic administrative procedure, informed Assange, detained since 2019 in the Belmarsh high-security prison, on the outskirts of London, that he was proceeding with what will be the last act background of the procedure: the decision of the Minister of the Interior.

defense claims

Assange’s defense can present allegations to the Minister of the Interior before his decision and once announced it can be appealed in judicial review (‘judicial review’), a resource that, according to legal sources in London, does not have much travel.

US prosecutors ask for Assange a sentence of up to 175 years in prison

Expectations in a decision favorable to Assange, that is, contrary to extradition, are very low, if not null. Because Priti Patel, the daughter of immigrants from Uganda and India, inspired by the leadership of Margaret Thatcher Upon entering the Conservative Party, he represented the most right-wing line favorable to Brexit and now exercises an anti-immigration philosophy from the Ministry of the Interior.

journalism and espionage

But as far as Assange is concerned, in particular, it is relevant the push Patel has given to the Official Secrets Bill to toughen penalties for leaking information considered classified. Although the text of his bill, which proposes to increase the penalties for leaking from 2 to 14 years, the words ‘journalist’ and ‘journalism’ are conspicuous by their absence and the word ‘press’ is only mentioned twice, it is It mixes or is assimilated in the same journalism with espionage, in an attempt to stop journalists, whistleblowers and sources of information when it comes to embarrassing governments and intelligence services.

Which is precisely the activity for which they want to try Assange, for whom the North American prosecutors ask for a sentence of up to 175 years in prison for 17 alleged violations of US espionage law.

Described as a “hacker”

Although a good part of the journalistic profession and the media seem to look the other way in this case, after filling their front pages for years with Assange’s revelations about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraqamong other issues, and there are even more than a few who qualify Assange as a “computer hacker”, the truth is that in the ‘Assange case’ a battle is taking place between certain states to criminalize information through the implementation of a de facto extraterritorial jurisdiction.

The UK has its own reasons for supporting this persecution. because during the Tony Blair era, one of the strategists with the US President George W. Bush of the iraq warthere were multiple leaks of relevant documents about the intoxication campaign of that conflict around the non-existent Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction -leaks in which Assange had nothing to do- in 2003 and 2004.

suicide risk

Now, how has it gone from a contrary verdict to extraditing Assange in December 2021 for health reasons to place him on the verge of surrendering to the US authorities?

Judge Vanessa Baraitser, who did not bite her sharp tongue against Assange during the trial, ruled instead that he could not be extradited to the US because his health problems meant, under the prison and criminal system to which he would be subjected, a serious risk to their survival, increasing the risk of suicide.

There is evidence that the intelligence services have tried unsuccessfully to assassinate Assange

The magistrate concluded, in accordance with current law and the agreements between the United Kingdom and the United States, that extradition is an “oppressive act”. But the lawyer who represents the US Ministry of Justice -James Lewis, who is also lawyer for Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein in the civil suit against Juan Carlos I in the English High Court of Justice – requested permission to appeal and, after obtaining authorization, offered all the guarantees to respect Assange’s situation in the US prison and even the possibility that he would serve part of his sentence in his native country, Australia. The court considered that commitment sufficient and gave the green light to extradition.

Unkept promises

Problem: The US fails to fulfill its commitments. The case of the Spanish citizen born in Los Angeles David Mendoza Herrarte is an example. He was delivered in 2009 by the National High Court to the US authorities with the condition -accepted- that once he was sentenced to 14 years -for importing marijuana from Canada to the US- he would serve a sentence in Spain. But the promise was blown away.

In March 2000, JackStraw, Minister of the Interior of the Government of Tony Blair, after being approved the extradition of Augusto Pinochet to Spain by the British court, decided on the basis of confidential medical reports that for health reasons –supervening senile dementia– The former Chilean dictator could not be put on trial and deemed his surrender to the Spanish authorities an “oppressive act”. Pinochet returned to Chile.

Related news

The testimonies of doctors and specialists about Assange’s poor health and suicide risks have been made in public, in an oral session. Added to this is evidence that the intelligence services have tried unsuccessfully to assassinate the journalist.

The die, then, should not be considered definitively cast.



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