The Extradition of Julian Assange - An Arrest on Freedom of Speech?

Some of you may wonder who exactly Julian Assange is and what's with the fuss with all the news around him, with a large number of free press NGOs backing him up and vehemently objecting to the persecution and extradition that the United States attempts to impose on him.

Amnesty International, Reporters without Borders, ACLU, Freedom of the Press Foundation - are just some of the many NGOs which advocate individuals' rights, liberties and solemnly swore to protect the very values that journalists represent - that had started petitions to urge the Biden administrations to drop the case against Julian Assange.

The seemingly dramatic legal saga in which its intricacies and significance remain rather clandestine to the public started when Wikileak, owned by Julian Assange, leaked a dozen of sensitive and confidential US documents relating to Iraq and Afghan war that was provided by a US intelligence analyst, Chelsea Manning. In particular, there was one leak, a video material involving the US military personnel who were operating an Apache helicopter opening fire and fatally killing Iraqi 'insurgencies', except that they aren't, they were civilians, families just taking a stroll with their children in the company of two Reuters journalists - that infuriated many and sparked intense interests.

What follows was global uproar, condemnations from civil liberties advocates and serious reputational damage to both the US military and government in power.

With the US being put under the limelight of international censure, ways were sought to indict Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange for what they've done. The Obama administration understood that filing charges against Julian Assange would constitute a potentially major threat to press freedom, for this is what journalists and every news agency such as The New York Times and The Guardian were meant to be doing, decided not to pursue any further.

The ensuing Trump administration however didn't think in the same vein, took a much more aggressive attitude and charged him officially in April 2019.

With regards to how and why the matter took such a sharp turn in the attitude adopted between the two administrations. Many analysts were on the same page on this, that the Trump administration viewed the matter from a far more political perspective, and that Wikileak was seen as an affront to the Trump administration being much more politically-centric and positioned themselves as an antithesis to the direction the Obama administration took.

Nevertheless, the insistence of the now Biden administration to push forward with the persecution of Assange took many by surprise, which thought the Biden administration would have been a better ally on the issues of news freedom.

Assange is now faced with 18 counts of criminal charges - 17 counts of espionage and 1 count of computer misuse - after being dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had been a political refuge there for almost 7 years, without stepping a single step outside of the embassy. He was then put under a maximum-security prison in the UK, the Belmarsh prison. And UK seems to have cracked under the mounting pressure and the judge in power had given their blessing to the extradition request.

The practice of journalism has reached a tipping point. This is the first time the Espionage Act has been applied to a journalist, and it could set a precedent that allows the US government to squelch and persecute anyone who publishes or distributes information that is deemed threatening to them. This is a very dangerous precedent, and one that autocratic regimes around the world have paid close attention to and are eager to imitate and impose.