The fate of Julian Assange concerns us all, journalists and citizens, news professionals and the public for whom the news is destined. It is because he made major revelations about America's wars and violations of human rights that the founder of WikiLeaks faces 18 charges in the United States, including espionage. The request for extradition to the United States from the United Kingdom is the culmination of eight years of constant persecution. Currently in detention in the UK for nearly a year, Assange has been deprived of his freedom since 2012, having spent seven years shut up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where his private life and his meetings with his lawyers were spied on by CIA contractors (read the Mediapart investigation by Jérôme Hourdeaux here).
The work of Julian Assange, a pioneer of the democratic potential of the digital revolution, enabled war crimes to be revealed to the world (see the video Collateral Murder here), as well as cases of torture, kidnapping and disappearances, economic corruption and tax fraud, state lies and attacks on fundamental freedoms. These revelations by WikiLeaks, which were carried by media around the world, were of major general importance. It was legitimate in terms of international law to make them public. Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and all the media who carried their information helped in the free exercise of a fundamental right of sovereign peoples; to know what is being done in their name by the states, governments and administrations which are accountable to them.
The extradition of Julian Assange to the United States would call into question this fundamental right which has been recognised by every universal declaration of rights and international convention. It would be an unprecedented attack on the freedom of the press, the freedom to investigate and the freedom to inform. It would criminalise the journalists who reveal the illegitimate secrets of governments and the whistleblowers who staunchly help them to find them. It would pave the way to a general offensive against the right to inform, which we have already seen with the repression and persecution of other investigative journalists and whistleblowers, such as Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowdon, Glenn Greenwald and Rui Pinto.
That is what lies behind this appeal on Monday February 24th by the #JournalistsSpeakUpForAssange initiative, supported by more than 1,300 journalists across the world, and in which Mediapart is taking part:
To defend Assange is to defend journalism. In other words to defend his purpose, in the service of a fundamental right which was proclaimed at the same time as the democratic ideals supported by the British Parliamentary, American independence and French revolutions. The French version of this defence of freedom of speech, which came in a proclamation delivered on August 13th 1789 by the first mayor of Paris, Jean Sylvain Bailly, who was also the first president of the Third Estate and the National Assembly, contains the phrase: “Publicity is the safeguard of the people”. The word publicity, which at that time had not taken on its commercial meaning, meant to make something public, in this case everything that concerned the sovereign people, all that which was done in their name, all that which involved the common good.
At the initiative of its founder and publisher, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks responded to this appeal for publicity by increasing its reach, thanks to the digital revolution, combining wiki or sharing, the internet's ability to link and massive leaks of metadata. Unless they renounce the professional principles written in their code of conduct, no journalist could deny that the WikiLeaks revelations were in the public interest. They opened up the path followed by many other whistleblowers who have allowed us to unearth genuine crimes (war, economic, tax and so on) committed under the cover of overly-protected secrets.
In addition to the fundamental legal issues raised by the American hounding of Assange (read here in Mediapart Club an appeal from lawyers of all nationalities) there is the crucial legal issue that the Assange case poses for our profession: should government secrecy prevail over the right to know? Every fundamental law, declaration and international convention drawn up since World War II has established that secrecy should not be an alibi for offences and crimes.
That is also what we at Mediapart have successfully argued each time that we justify the revelation of information of major general interest coming from documents that are, at first sight, protected by business confidentiality, national security, judicial confidentiality and even privacy – that was particularly the case in the Bettencourt affair. The courts usually rule in favour of the fundamental right to know anything which relates to the general interest, given the nature of the facts concealed by the misuse of these secrecy rights for self-interested opacity, facts which are revealed by journalistic investigations with the help of whistleblowers.
To accept that the director of a news media outlet – and WikiLeaks is one, whatever you think of its editorial line which is part of media plurality - should be treated like a spy or hacker, in other words a high-level criminal, is to bring journalism down to the level of criminality. And in particular that form of journalism which irritates, reveals, unveils, enlightens, de-masks and denounces. If Assange is extradited to the United States, where he risks life imprisonment, that day will be a sombre one in the history of freedom. It will also be an immense step backwards in the right to inform in a country which prides itself over having articulated that right in a radically democratic way, in the form of the US Constitution's First Amendment.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Journalists and whistleblowers do not have to be saintly. Democracies, however, have to be healthy, in other words to be able to accept counter-powers, opposition and revelations, and truths which can shake up the established powers. In this sense Julian Assange's fate is part of a wider global fight and universal challenge against governments who take office having been voted in and anointed by elections, and who are then tempted to reduce the source of democratic legitimacy just to those processes. In doing those these governments hijack popular sovereignty for their own means, in order to get rid of all political complexity and vitality. Attacks against the freedom of the press are the first symptom of this march towards authoritarianism, which is gaining ground and becoming a threat on every continent. And the attack on the founder of WikiLeaks is the most obvious symbol of this.
Julian Assange's legal fate is being decided in Great Britain, the country of the anti-authoritarian author of the novel 1984, George Orwell. “One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal ,” wrote Orwell in his proposed preface to another of his famous works, Animal Farm. In this preface, which was lost for many years, the British writer expressed alarm at the “general weakening of the western liberal tradition”. Oh how this sentiment applies to the start of this century! A time when political liberalism has been defeated by an authoritarian liberalism which imposes the iron laws of money and merchandise on the many, having succeeded in putting the power of the state at the service of a small minority of privileged people.
In December 1944, at the time he was writing his preface, George Orwell attended a meeting of the writers' association Pen International that had been organised to celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of the publication of Areopagitica by the English writer John Milton. This 1644 polemic, which has as its subtitle 'A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing, to the Parliament of England', was the first text which radically defended the right to inform. It was first translated into French at the end of 1788, several months before the French Revolution. Its translator was none other than one of the looming Revolution's leading orators, the Count of Mirabeau. His version, entitled 'Sur la liberté de la presse, imité de l’Anglais de Milton', had on its cover, in both French and English, a quotation from Milton's text: “Who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature ... but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.”
Mireabeau himself extended Milton's work. Having recalled that England was the first nation to accept the freedom of the press, he praised how this “sword of Damocles is hanging everywhere in English over the head of anyone who would contemplate, in the secret of their own heart, some project deadly to the prince or the people”. He concluded: “May the first of your laws be consecrated forever to the freedom of the press, the most inviolable, the most unlimited freedom: may it print a stamp of public scorn on the forehead of the ignoramus who is fearful about abuses of this freedom; may it devote itself to the universal execration of the villain who pretends to fear them....the wretch!”
Milton's own text ends with a defence of the freedom of the press as a safeguard against errors, noting that “errors in a good government” are just as common as “in a bad [one]”. He wrote: “..for what Magistrate may not be mis-inform'd … if liberty of printing be reduc't into [editor's note, ie be reduced to] the power of a few.”
This sentiment harks from a time of revolution, the first modern political revolution, and one which preceded the revolutions in America, France and Haiti. It took place in England between 1642 and 1660 and led to a short-lived republic and the execution of a king, and opened the horizons to a politically radical liberalism, the reverse of absolute monarchy, imperial Bonapartism or republican Caesarism.
John Milton is better known these days as a great poet, the author of the celebrated epic poem Paradise Lost, but he was one of the most active and radical pamphleteers of his day. In 1642, two years before his defence of the freedom of the press, Milton wrote a far-sighted, prophetic line which has sometimes been used by the modern day 'gilets jaunes' or 'yellow vest' protestors in France when faced with police violence: “They who have put out the people's eyes, reproach them of their blindness.”
Meanwhile, one of the principles defended by Orwell in his long-forgotten preface – which was revived for the 50th anniversary of Animal Farm in 1995 – entered into European human rights law in 1976 in the Handyside case involving the United Kingdom. In its judgement the European Court of Human Rights stated that freedom of expression applies “not only to 'information' or 'ideas' that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population”. It went on to state: “Such are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness without which there is no 'democratic society'.” In the WikiLeaks revelations, Julian Assange served these democratic principles.
In his preface George Orwell put it more pithily and directly: “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” And anticipating opponents of his argument on free speech, Orwell chose to cite a line from Milton: “By the known rules of ancient liberty.”
We as journalists ask the British justice system to stay faithful to this ancient freedom by freeing Julian Assange and refusing his extradition to the United States.
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- The French version of this op-ed can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter