Show notes
Julian Assange was arrested outside England's Ecuadorian embassy after Ecuador's president revoked his political asylum. The U.S. unsealed an extradition request outlining Espionage Act charges, and U.K. authorities moved him to London's Belmarsh Prison in April 2019, a maximum security facility where inmates are held in small single cells. Amnesty International has drawn parallels between Belmarsh and Guantanamo Bay. Reports and statements from doctors emerged quickly after his imprisonment testifying to his deteriorating mental and physical health. Stella Assange—an attorney specializing in international law, a human rights activist, and the wife of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, with whom she has two children—joined Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on episode three of Just Asking Questions to talk about the toll that imprisonment has taken on Assange and his family. They also discuss the threat to freedom of speech that the United States' Espionage Act case against Assange poses, why she believes that the Swedish sex charges against him were bogus, and why many in the U.S. media seem hostile to Assange and WikiLeaks. Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher. Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below. Zach Weissmueller: Julian Assange was arrested outside England's Ecuadorian embassy after his political asylum was revoked and moved to Belmarsh Prison in April 2019. That's a maximum security facility where inmates are held in small single cells. Amnesty International has drawn parallels to Guantanamo Bay. Reports and statements from doctors emerged quickly after that imprisonment, testifying to his deteriorating mental and physical health. How is he doing today? Stella Assange: Well, as we film this, we're nearing his fifth Christmas in Belmarsh Prison, and he has been there for over four and a half years now because the U.S. has been trying to extradite him since April 11, 2019, and he hasn't left the facility to go to court since January 2021. That was the last time they allowed him to come to court for his own hearings. Since then, he's been participating remotely over video because they don't let him even go to the courtroom. His physical state has obviously deteriorated over that time. He spends a lot of time in his cell, but he is able to receive visits. So once or twice a week I can go and see him on weekends. I can bring the kids and that obviously helps him a lot. He can call me from Belmarsh Prison during certain hours throughout the day. So we are in contact during the day for most days, unless there is some kind of problem. And that obviously keeps him sane and helps us both feel like we're not so separated. Weissmueller: You're a mother, and you have kids together, how often are you able to travel to see him? And what is the personal situation like for you? Assange: Well, it's obviously very difficult. Our children, the oldest one is 6 and a half, and the youngest one will turn 5 in February. All of their memories of Julian are inside this one big visiting hall inside Belmarsh Prison. And I reiterate that Julian is only there because there is this extradition request from the United States. He's not charged with any crime in the United Kingdom. They're just holding him on behalf of the United States which is opposing bail. And so we're forced to interact within this extremely harsh environment. And that's all the children know, visiting their father inside a big, loud, monitored visiting home once a week, more or less. Liz Wolfe: How do you explain that to your children? How much do they know about their father's situation? Assange: It's really a mix of the two. So I've tried to introduce context as they grow older. I didn't want them to understand what a prison was before for other concepts like freedom and fairness. Actually, it was our eldest son, Gabriel, at one point, I guess he was around 5, when he asked if Julian was in prison. This place that we went to, was it a prison? And I told him yes. Before that I would say, we're going to the big building where Daddy is, and it's not Daddy's home. He's just being kept there. And obviously, they experience the whole process of going through the prison security, which everyone has to go through. Everyone, including toddlers, has to be searched by the dogs. They look inside their mouths and so on. They get patted down. They've seen that, and they live it. I explained that, yes, it's a prison, but that daddy hasn't done anything wrong. In fact, he's done good things, and he's being punished by bad people. I'm trying to explain it in age-appropriate ways and also trying to counter the immediate horror of the situation with the fact that lots of people support Julian and are fighting for his freedom. And sometimes I've taken them to protests and so on so that they actually see that there are a lot of people that support Julian and that there's something bigger going on. He's not just any other prisoner. And that's obvious from when you visit Belmarsh. There are huge banners saying "Free Julian Assange." At least once a week there's a protest. People go into the prison premises with loudspeakers and call for him to be released. This is a unique case, and I think they can sense that there's something special about their dad. And I've told them it's not the guards themselves, who they see and interact with, who are holding their father specifically. It's the people above them, the people who decide. And they're the people that Julian made angry because he showed the world that they had done bad things. And they're angry about that. That's generally how I try to explain it. And they understand. I tell them that Daddy's a hero. Millions of people around the world admire him. He spoke the truth. And sometimes it's difficult to tell the truth. And a lot of people will get angry and try to take revenge. Wolfe: You first met Julian, if I'm not mistaken, when he was fighting sexual assault charges in Sweden. And you initially joined his defense team. What made you interested in that case? And what's your perspective on that whole case? Assange: I joined his legal team in February 2011, and Julian had started publishing the WikiLeaks publications that had been sent to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning in 2010, so a year before I joined his team. These publications from Chelsea Manning were the "collateral murder" video, the Iraq War logs, Afghanistan war diaries, diplomatic cables, and the Guantanamo Bay files. These are the same publications that Julian is indicted with now that had happened in the lead-up to me joining his legal team. And it had also started prior to any preliminary investigation being opened in Sweden. And actually, there were never any charges in Sweden. None were brought. And that's quite amazing because it kind of defies logic, right? Because there was a big extradition case, and Sweden would say, "Well, we haven't decided whether to actually bring charges against him, but we just want to question him." And then there was this question about, well, "Why don't you just question him?" Anyway, that Swedish preliminary investigation was dropped and resurrected multiple times. It was dropped four times, resurrected three. No charges were ever brought. It's quite extraordinary. The amazing thing about this case is that the prosecutor was refusing to question him. How can it possibly be that in a sex case where, of course, memories fade and it all depends on the recollections of the people involved, the prosecutor had to be compelled by the Swedish Court of Appeal, six years after the fact, to question him? The reason the Court of Appeal compelled her was that they said she had failed her professional duty to advance the case. And, of course, this is just one aspect of how that Swedish preliminary investigation was abusive. The reason it was abusive was because it took place in a highly charged political moment in which Julian was being actively sought by authorities because he was about to publish the Chelsea Manning leaks. He had already published the "collateral murder" video and the Afghan [Diaries]. And it was one month before WikiLeaks started publishing the Iraq War logs that he went to Sweden. There's actually a Daily Beast article that's archived in which the U.S. reporter says the State Department was contacting its allies in Europe and urging them to find a way to stop Julian in his tracks, to arrest him on whatever because by then they had arrested Chelsea Manning, then Bradley Manning, and they knew that WikiLeaks had more major leaks coming out. And so they wanted to stop him in his tracks. They contacted the Australians. The Australians were looking to cancel his passport. And then there was an investigation by the Australian police, and then the Australian police recommending not canceling his passport thinking it would be easier to track his movements. And ultimately Sweden initiated this preliminary investigation, which was condemned by the United Nations as an abuse against Julian's rights as a defendant. He was, in fact, never formally a defendant because he was never charged, which meant that he was never given access to exculpatory evidence of text messages that we knew existed. And so the U.N. special rapporteur on torture also did an investigation and in 2019 wrote to the Swedish and U.K. governments who refused to cooperate. He wrote a whole book about it. It's called The Trial of Julian Assange. And for any viewers who are interested in this kind of Swedish preliminary investigation, which also served to cast a shadow on Julian to treat him as an accused person without being formally accused, there's another book called Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies by Stefania Maurizi who is an Italian investigative journalist. Stefania Maurizi has done a lot of [Freedom of Information Act] work and obtained a bunch of correspondence, some of which had been destroyed by one party, which is the U.K. government, which is incredibly damning. And it shows how, in fact, there was a collusion between the U.K. and Sweden. The U.K. was telling Sweden not to question him, to extradite him, and that Sweden was going to put him in custody immediately and urging them not to progress the investigation unless he was extradited. This is extremely bizarre. Of course, denying a suspect the ability to defend himself is unjust. If you think this is just a regular case, then none of it makes sense. But once you understand the political context, then, of course, it all makes sense. It even says in this correspondence that Stefania Maurizi discovered literally the sentence, "Please do not think that we are treating this as just any other extradition case." That's the words of the U.K. prosecution authority who was communicating with the Swedish authorities. And then when Sweden tried to drop it in 2013, the U.K. responded by saying, "Don't you dare get cold feet telling them not to drop it." So it's pretty clear. But of course, as soon as that was dropped, it was revealed that there was an indictment that had come under the Trump administration, and Julian has been in Belmarsh in relation to that extradition request from the U.S. since 2019. Wolfe: These are not the traditional circumstances under which most people meet their spouses. What was this like for you emotionally? How did you feel signing up to work on this case and then getting to know Julian, like what was swirling around in your head? Assange: Well, I was steeped in the documents surrounding this Swedish preliminary investigation, and there was no case to answer. From the beginning, it was pretty clear that the administrative use of the extradition request from Sweden was a way to trap him, basically to bury him in a legal quagmire in order to interfere with his publishing work. In Sweden, as I said, like the initial prosecutor who looked at the case said there, there is no crime of rape involved in these allegations. The Swedish conduct in this case also responds to local dynamics. The person who took on the case within days was also running for general elections in Sweden. He was tipped to become the new justice minister. Julian's case was in the media. There were a lot of motivations. It wasn't just the likely nudge from the State Department at the highest levels. Julian's name was leaked to the press, which should never happen in the case of a preliminary investigation where the person hasn't even been formally accused. And as I said, he was never formally accused in those nine years. The U.N.'s working group on arbitrary detention, which looked at this case from 2014 onwards, saw the underlying investigation material. It was an adversarial process in which Sweden and the U.K. were unsuccessful in convincing this group of U.N. experts on arbitrary detention that they had conducted themselves in a lawful manner. They had, in fact, violated international obligations concerning arbitrary detention when it came to Julian, because, as I said, he was neither convicted nor even charged in relation to Sweden. And so it was this extraordinarily abusive nature of the Swedish allegations that was immediately obvious to me, as a member of his legal team. And so I could directly access the material of the case that we had access to to see that this was absurd. And my own experience, I mean, as I got to know Julian, was to see how he was persecuted and maligned in all sorts of ways. Of course, the Swedish aspect was just one. It was an effective one because Julian had a lot of support from the left initially because these publications concerned, of course, the Bush wars and so on. And a sex case, even one without a formal accusation or a conviction or anything, obviously is going to alienate a portion of the left and a big portion of women. And there was a deliberate strategy as these FOIA documents show, to keep him in this position of not being able to defend himself, with not being able to clear his name because they refused to question him. Sweden refused to give him a guarantee that he wouldn't be extradited to the United States. Sweden, in spite of its reputation, was a participant in the CIA rendition program, it branded al-Zari and Agiza, two asylum seekers who were in the process of applying for protection, and instead they were taken on a CIA flight and tortured in Egypt. And this was one of the most obvious and one of the most shocking cases of CIA rendition. Since 2001, Sweden, I don't know if it's still true, but while Julian was still facing potential extradition, Sweden has not once rejected an extradition request to the United States. And this is different to the U.K., which has rejected extradition requests to the United States. So this was also a factor in Julian's decision to resist extradition to Sweden, which is a very small country and views itself as a very small country, certainly in relation to the U.S. Weissmueller: There are people who were or are friendly to the WikiLeaks mission who say that Julian Assange is a problematic figure. It's a theme that you see in multiple documentaries produced about him, including Risk by Laura Poitras, who's sympathetic but takes this position that Julian's personal troubles are intertwined too much with WikiLeaks' mission. What do you make of that kind of criticism? Assange: It's really a dated criticism because that kind of criticism came about w…
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