President Hollande rejects French asylum for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

JustJust ten days ago he was working with Mediapart and Libération to expose how the United States has been systemically spying on French presidents. However on Friday, July 3rd, Julian Assange found his apparent request for political asylum in France brusquely turned down by France's current head of state, President François Hollande.

Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and a co-author of last week's revelations about National Security Agency snooping on the French establishment, had made an empassioned plea to President Hollande about seeking asylum in France in an open letter published by Le Monde on Friday morning. Having been cooped up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for three years, where he has taken refuge to avoid extradition to Sweden over alleged sex crimes, Assange wrote to Hollande: “France is the only country that can offer me the necessary protection against ... the political persecutions I face...my life is in danger.” He said that a secret grand jury had been convened in the United States four years ago into allegations of espionage, and had been investigating ever since.
However, in a terse statement delivered just an hour after the letter was published, the Elysée dismissed Assange's demands. “France has received the letter from Mr Assange. An in-depth review shows that in view of the legal and material elements of Mr Assange's situation, France cannot grant his request,” the statement said. “The situation of Mr. Assange does not present any immediate danger. He is also the target of a European arrest warrant.” In other words, granting asylum is impossible because the United States – where Assange fears he would end up being sent if he is extradited to Sweden – has not yet made a formal extradition request, while Sweden has filed an extradition request in relation to the alleged sexual offences.

In any case, the Elysée's decision seems curious because as yet no formal application for asylum has in fact been made by Julian Assange. The case has not been referred either to the French Embassy in London nor the only French body able to rule on an application, the Office Français de Protection des Réfugiés et Apatrides (OFPRA).

“Julian Assange has not lodged any request for asylum in France,” Baltaser Garzón, the director of the WikiLeaks founder's defence team, said in a statement. “Julian Assange simply reacted to comments from Christiane Taubira, the [French] minister of justice, and an appeal from groups in civic society to receive him in France, and which was signed by forty eminent intellectuals and figures from the world of culture.” Garzón continued: “Mr Assange wanted to use this opportunity to remind people of the deep links that bind him to this country and show his availability to be received by this country if, and only if, an initiative was taken by the competent authorities...Julian Assange's defence team wonder as to the reality of the 'in-depth review' supposedly carried out of Mr Assange's letter in, to say the least, limited time, and as to the reasons which have brought them to such a hasty decision.”

Meanwhile the sheer haste of the Elysée's decision appalled many observers. The anti-racist association SOS-Racisme Tweeted its astonishment (see below): “Eritreans, Yemenites, Syrians … all are happy to learn that OFPRA now take 58 minutes to examine asylum applications.”

Meanwhile the environmental alliance EELV said in a statement that it was “scandalised by the response – as immediate as it was terse – given by the president of the Republic to the request for asylum from Julian Assange”. It added: “The rapidity of the response constitutes in itself a terrible admission of weakness which sadly recalls the illegal interception of the Bolivian president's aeroplane by the French authorities who feared that [Edward] Snowden had taken refuge inside...” Green Euro MP Eva Joly made a link between the decision to refuse asylum and the handling of the Greek crisis. “Non assistance to a Greece in danger, refusal to welcome Assange. Hollande's France sees its values shrinking by the day,” she Tweeted.

However, the Elysée's decision came as no great surprise. France has always rejected the idea of taking in whistleblowers such as Julian Assange and the former National Security Agency (NSA) employee Edward Snowden, who revealed the practices of the American intelligence services. Yet on June 26th Christiane Taubira dissented from this view. “There is a symbolic dimension in making that gesture,” she told BFMTV. “And if France decided to offer asylum [to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange] I personally wouldn't see anything shocking in that given that we have introduced protection for whistleblowers into our law. That doesn’t shock me at all,” said the minister of justice.

Her remarks, though, were quickly waved away by President Hollande's office. “We haven't received any such demand so the question doesn't arise,” said an Elysée spokesman at the time. However, in relation to Julian Assange at least, the Elysée has now made its position very clear.

In fact, prime minister Manuel Valls has always been opposed to offering asylum to Edward Snowden. After Snowden's revelations broke in 2013, Valls, then minister of the interior, said he was “not very favourable” to the idea. “[The United States] is a democratic country and we have relationships with [them], notably concerning possible extradition for a certain number of individuals ...It's a democracy not a dictatorship. There’s a justice system, an independent justice system,” said Valls.

Another leading socialist opposed to the idea of asylum for such figures is MP Jean-Jacques Urvoas, a close ally of Valls and the man who steered the controversial new surveillance law through the National Assembly. “To seek asylum you have to be the object of persecution, have to be on that country's soil [editor's note, where you are seeking asylum] and not come from a democracy in which the justice system is independent,” he told France Inter radio. “I don't see why, in terms of asylum or political refugee status, we would give asylum to someone who is not persecuted, and who is in a democracy which has an independent justice system.”

'Persecuted and threatened'

However, the furore that greeted the publication ten days ago by Mediapart and Libération of the WikiLeaks documents on US spying on France has altered the whole tone of the debate. After those revelations lawyer Jean-Pierre Mignard, who represents Mediapart but who is also close to François Hollande, said that “Julian Assange and Edward Snowden [had to be] granted asylum”. He said: “Whoever fights for freedom will get asylum on the Republic's soil. Those are the basic tenets of the French Revolution. The Geneva Convention contains them too. They have fought for our liberty, they have revealed serious facts of which we were ignorant.”

Then on July 2nd, 2015, in an article published on Mediapart, several politicians and intellectuals also called for France to open its doors to Julian Assange and Edward Snowden whom they said were “persecuted, threatened, defamed, cut off from those close to them, submitted to constant harassment”.

“You could say that these men are whistleblowers and that today we should open our doors to that kind of person,” green senator Esther Benbassa told Mediapart in a video interview. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of the radical left Parti de Gauche, even called for the pair to be offered French citizenship as “they have benefited out country with information which allows it to protect its sovereignty”.

However, even thsoe politicians who back the principle of asylum for whistleblowers do not speak with one voice. Franck Riester, an MP for the right-wing Les Républicains (ex-UMP), who voted against the surveillance law, warned against getting carried away over granting asylum to the two men. “You can't do this in the heat of the moment, as silly and poor reprisals against the United States in relation to what we have just found out,” he said, referring to the spying revelations. “First of all we have to create a coherent framework to protect whistleblowers, just as much for our nationals abroad as for nationals of other countries, and that's what we are doing in the context of the Assembly's digital committee.” Another LR MP, Laure de la Raudière, who also opposed the snooping bill, agreed that French law should do its best to “respect whistleblowers” even if this caused “difficult diplomatic questions”. But she declined to comment on the individual cases of Snowden and Assange.

Some politicians draw a distinction between the cases of the two men. Green MP Sergio Coronado told Mediapart: “I remain favourable to constitutional asylum for Snowden. Assange, that's more difficult, because he is the object of proceedings which have nothing to do with the revealing of confidential documents.” Meanwhile socialist MP Christian Paul said: “Even if Julian Assange's case is a little different, WikiLeaks is a non-governmental organisation which defends freedom of expression.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------

• The French version of this article can be found here.

 English version by Michael Streeter