Judge threatens to break the UK's wall of secrecy around Assange's persecution

For years, the UK and Sweden stymied Freedom of Information requests to hide why prosecutors under Keir Starmer pursued the Wikileaks founder. Finally the game may be up

After nine years of legal battles, a British judge has finally challenged the wall of secrecy erected by British and Swedish authorities around the legal abuse of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Judge Foss, sitting at the London First-Tier Tribunal, has ruled that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) must explain how it came to destroy key files that would have shed light on why it pursued Assange for 14 years. The CPS appears to have done so in breach of its own procedures.

Assange was finally released from Belmarsh high-security prison last year in a plea deal after Washington had spent years seeking his extradition for publishing documents revealing US and UK war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The CPS files relate to lengthy correspondence between the UK and Sweden over a preliminary investigation into rape allegations in Sweden that predate the US extradition case.

A few CPS emails from that time were not destroyed and have been released under Freedom of Information rules. They show that it was the UK authorities pushing reluctant Swedish prosecutors to pursue the case against Assange. Eventually, Swedish prosecutors dropped the case after running it into the ground.

In other words, the few documents that have come to light show that it was the CPS – led at that time by Keir Starmer, later knighted and now Britain’s prime minister – that waged what appears to have been a campaign of political persecution against Assange, rather than one based on proper legal considerations.

It is not just Britain concealing documents relating to Assange. The US, Swedish and Australian authorities have also put up what Stefania Maurizi, an Italian journalist who has been doggedly pursuing the FoI requests, has called “a wall of darkness”.

There are good grounds for believing that all four governments have coordinated their moves to cover up what would amount to legal abuses in the Assange case.

Starmer headed the CPS when many highly suspect decisions regarding Assange were made. If the documents truly have been destroyed, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to ever know how directly he was involved in those decisions.

Extraordinarily, and conveniently for both the UK and Sweden, it emerged during legal hearings in early 2023 that prosecutors in Stockholm claim to have destroyed the very same correspondence deleted by the CPS.

The new ruling by Judge Foss will require the CPS to explain how and why it destroyed the documents, and provide them unless it can demonstrate that there is no way they can ever be retrieved. Failure to do so by February 21 will be treated as contempt of court.

The UK and the US have similarly sought to stonewall separate FoI requests from Maurizi concerning their lengthy correspondence while Washington sought to extradite Assange on "espionage" charges for revealing their war crimes.

The British judiciary approved locking Assange up for years while the extradition case dragged on, despite United Nations legal experts ruling that Assange was being “arbitrarily detained” and the UN’s expert on torture, Nils Melzer, finding that Assange was being subjected to prolonged psychological torture that posed a threat to his life.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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