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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68662881
The US must provide assurances that Julian Assange will not receive the death penalty if convicted, before a UK court rules on whether he can appeal against his extradition.
The court has adjourned its decision by three weeks to give the US government time to comply.
US authorities say the Wikileaks founder endangered lives by publishing thousands of classified documents.
His lawyers have argued that the case is form of "state retaliation".
In a High Court judgment on Tuesday, Dame Victoria Sharp and Mr Justice Johnson said that Mr Assange would be able to bring an appeal on three grounds, unless assurances were given by the United States.
These assurances are that the 52-year-old would be protected by and allowed to rely on the First Amendment - which protects freedom of speech in the US; that he would not be "prejudiced at trial" due to his nationality; and that he would not face the death penalty if he is convicted.
Judges have given the US authorities three weeks to make those assurances, with a final hearing potentially taking place on 20 May.
"If assurances are not given then we will grant leave to appeal without a further hearing," said Dame Victoria in the court's ruling.
"If assurances are given then we will give the parties an opportunity to make further submissions before we make a final decision on the application for leave to appeal."
See also: Julian Assange faces further wait over extradition ruling
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 26 2024, @04:07PM (15 children)
Assange is a political prisoner
And Wikileaks.. what's up with them? What are they doing to expose the corruption of this case? Why do they have no effect? All the same psychopaths are still in charge, none of them are in jail for their crimes against humanity.. Seems that Wikileaks is kind of toothless, or it reflects that we are just as corrupt as the psychos we reelect
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 26 2024, @04:38PM (8 children)
I partially agree, but we don't elect CIA, FBI, NSA, DIA, FCC, SEC, justice dept., police, etc. Stupid Congress gives them far too much latitude and they pretty much do as they please. The very wrongest people are in power in those agencies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 26 2024, @04:47PM (3 children)
"Stupid Congress" = Stupid voters. If you don't believe me, look at the reelection rates, holding steady at 95%. That's not anybody's fault but our own.
All those agencies have the power that we give them through congress
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 26 2024, @05:35PM (1 child)
Yeah, great, new ideas, new people who don't really understand how huge and complex government is. (that was sarcasm)
What I think would hugely help: very frequent voting, many times a year. Just like any job, you get performance reviews, and maybe fired and replaced. It might be messy for a while, but medium to long-term I think society would greatly improve.
In 1780 we couldn't easily vote so frequently. Now, if we can clean up all the problems with voting, security, fraud, etc., we could do it frequently.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2024, @02:40AM
What problems might those be, friend? And please, be specific. And cite actual issues that changed the outcome of elections so we know what you're *specifically* going on about.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Tuesday March 26 2024, @05:45PM
The problem is that they've been interfering in elections for decades. Not to mention all the times where they create criminal conspiracies in order to rationalize their overreaching. So often, the end reality is that the FBI had to provide the plans, connections and supplies in order to have somebody to bust. If they're having to provide all of that, then in what sense did they stop anything? They literally provided basically everything except for a handful of angry nutters. Nutters that lacked any of the necessary things to actually do anything other than be upset.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday March 26 2024, @04:57PM (3 children)
So I remember some of the history here.
Back when Wikileaks was making the Bush administration look bad, the Democrats were largely cheering while the Republicans were largely calling for Assange's head on a platter, and shortly after that came the sexual misconduct accusations (with the absolute demand that he be physically in custody in Sweden with no assurances at all that he wouldn't be turned over to the US immediately after questioning) that put him on the run in the UK and then to the Ecuador embassy in London. Then in 2016, Wikileaks made Hillary Clinton look bad too, and suddenly the Democrats were also calling for Assange's scalp, and that's about the point where efforts started being made to force him out of the Ecuador embassy and into prison. And there he's been, for years since, all without trial.
He absolutely could make the argument that he's a political prisoner, and has been now for approximately 15 years, all for publishing information inconvenient to politicians, something that's supposed to be legal in a free country.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday March 26 2024, @05:48PM
> for publishing information inconvenient to politicians
No, for publishing information inconvenient to TLAs.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by quietus on Tuesday March 26 2024, @09:17PM (1 child)
I also remember some history, from that same period.
Katharine Gun leaked a secret memo in which the NSA requested the UK's aid in bugging the United Nations' offices of a number of nations. She didn't hide in a corner, and look what happened to her [wikipedia.org]
. Odd, eh?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2024, @10:56PM
There's a difference.
She was a one-time leak and she'll never do it again. Prosecuting any case against her would have either been empty of evidence or exposed a lot of info they didn't want to expose.
Assange set up wikileaks, which is an ongoing irritation to all the shady shits out there. Regardless of what he is charged with, his real death penalty crime is the on-going publishing of their dirty little secrets.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday March 26 2024, @05:55PM (3 children)
Revealing the truth only has an effect if people are outraged by the truth and demand justice and change.
But nobody is outraged anymore: there has been such an onslaught of injustive and dystopia in the past 2 decades that most people have just given up. All you get when you reveal to people the staggeringly amoral and anticonstitutional things their government, the TLAs and the military do with their tax money is apathy.
Nobody cares anymore. Or rather, they would care if they didn't feel crushed by the sheer about of it. People rightfully feel steamrolled and they just don't fight anymore.
Case in point: remember Watergate? Nixon lost his seat over this. It was a huge scandal. Watergate wouldn't even be a minor news item on page 3 of your local newspaper in 2024: nowadays, a former president who's being sued for tax evasion, sex scandal and attempting a coup is running for a second term and nobody bats an eyelid. Can you imagine this in 1974? I was there back then, and I can tell you, the streets would have erupted in demonstrations across the country for months.
So yeah, Wikileaks is toothless because whatever is has to reveal is pretty much ignored by everybody.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 26 2024, @08:00PM
Ultimately replaced by Reagan, an administration full of scandals, nothing but feigned outrage there. So here we are, going from bad to worse, ever since Kennedy died. Nothing really has changed except we don't try to hide it anymore, kinda difficult with this internet thingy.
Oh, and nobody was outraged during Chile's 9/11, done by the CIA, widely known even at the time. What became of the Church Committee in '75? Nothing, some name changes. Iran/Contra? Meh...
There's more to Watergate than just a silly break-in, could have been a cover for his treason back in '68 [historynewsnetwork.org]
Wikileaks is toothless, so were the Pentagon Papers, neither upset the apple cart, just a lot of noise
(Score: 3, Interesting) by quietus on Tuesday March 26 2024, @09:04PM (1 child)
Disagree. Wikileaks is toothless because it is pointless.
It is pointless, because the real problems are out there in the open, instead of hidden away in "secrets".
Take that high-watermark of Wikileaks-reveal: an Apache helicopter "lighting up" some people in a street in Bagdad, because they felt like it. A few dudes in killer machines, high on Hollywood war hero propaganda, wasn't the problem with the whole Iraq invasion.
The problem with the Iraq invasion was that their was no valid reason for the invasion in the first place, and secondly, even if the Iraqis would have welcomed the US military with flowers and sweets, that their wasn't a damn plan at all about what to do once the glorious camera-victory was won: nothing about how they were going to deal with the infrastructure rebuild, the food supply, public services and the officials who had manned these. Nothing at all.
You wouldn't know that when you read the quality newspapers, ofcourse: they were too busy whipping themselves into outrage about the Wikileaks "revelations". In the meantime, US Congressman Henry S. Waxman was bringing these issues to the fore through the House Budget and Oversight Committee, but he couldn't get more than a few alinea's in the New York Times, 3 or 4 days after the Hearing -- and only in reaction to the colleagues of the UK's Financial Times reporting about it.
Wikileaks was nothing more than a convenient and entertaining distraction, which quite possibly made life even more miserable for Iraqis, and the rest of the world.
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Tuesday March 26 2024, @11:37PM
It wasn't pointless. All US war exist to give it some sort of advantage be it in global trade or just to remind everyone they still could kick ass despite Vietnam. Many people in US itself wouldn't agree with this but it isn't most important issue on elections.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Tuesday March 26 2024, @07:59PM (1 child)
why haven't they had any consequential effect? Well, that is how real power works. people aren't so much elected by the democratic mob as they are groomed for positions of power that are horse-traded by our international elites. no one is getting close to the levers of power that isn't fully bought and paid for. If you would like to effect real change in the world, makes lots of money. see what happens. see who comes around to visit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 26 2024, @08:10PM
Sure they are, it's right there is the count, you're not saying the elections are fraudulent, are you? Nobody, no matter how rich, can win the seat without winning the election by the "democrat mob". They are the ones attracted to the money.