Julian Assange extradition to US blocked by UK court
bbc.com
bbc.com
There's currently a lot of criticism towards China for arresting journalists investigating controversial topics.
At the same time, the US is doing literally the same thing, little to no backlash.
Response to protests in China leads to people being crushed into literal chutney, and deaths in the 10s of thousands. That was the nature of deaths in tiananmen square, the photos of which often do not get shown in western media.[1]
[1] https://www.aboluowang.com/2008/0529/89034.html (Warning: NSFL/Gore/Human remains )
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The US has a lot to work on, but comparing it to China is a false equivalency.
edit: if this comment comes off as too emotionally charged/ visual, the mods can feel free to delete it.
The Tianmen Square protests are well known in the west (tank man is a very iconic picture known by basically everyone) contrary to your claim and if the sources on wikipedia are to be believed did not result in 10s of thousands of deaths (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...).
In general I think it is a constant struggle to keep society free from tyranny, and you should not torpedo that with comparisons with places that have it worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_dur...
More recently, they are usually killed by right wing extremists who are unofficially sanctioned by government and often not prosecuted.
Big citation needed here. You'd be hard pressed to find any deaths here that weren't obvious, often video-documented cases of self-defense. Even then, the state has zealously prosecuted them, in Jake Gardner's case overriding the local prosecutor's determination that no crime had been committed and leading Gardner to suicide. Most ridiculous of them all, Kyle Rittenhouse is facing murder charges when every single one of his so-called victims is on video assaulting him.
US constantly meddles in other countries affairs, and has scant regard for international organizations.
Abu Gharib is not so far behind us. Nor is indiscriminate drone attacks which may have caused massive amounts of collateral damage.
Despite the sentiment here, US simply does not have a good image in most of the 3rd world.
Even walking out of Paris Climate Deal does not give much credence to the view that US is willing to coexist and cooperate with other nations.
Obviously comparing in terms of absolute metrics is not going to be very similar since US and China are very different countries, but at the same time, if the hypothetical came to pass, it wouldn't be the first time in history that a "modern", "powerful" country fell into ruin.
Is it possible you also view the US with a certain rosey bias? Check out any of a bunch of major metrics, like murder, infant mortality, homelessness, healthcare, police brutality, and it must be said Covid mortality. Visit the south side of Chicago. If all you can say is "at least it is better than China, a third world country," then you aren't saying much, and in plenty of cases it actually isn't true.
The purpose of these comparisons is to identify the similarity to the behavior of a country known to be worse. "China is worse." Yes, that's the point. We don't want to be like them, so we have to stop being like them.
Except the US is not. That's the point s/he was trying to make. Exaggeration only pushes the discussion to the most radical corners and ignores nuance.
They're trying to prosecute someone for the exact thing we need journalists to do in a free society. That's what China does, it's wrong, and we shouldn't be doing it.
You don't get to say we're not doing it until we're not doing it.
The US is better than China, but that's a low bar, and in a few areas it's only barely clearing that bar.
In other areas it's a lot better of course. Censorship is the big one. Also, the way China has oppressed some minorities (Uyghurs) hasn't happened in the US in decades (black people, native Americans). And the oppression did happen in a different way. But "different" isn't always better.
I've heard people compare the imprisonment, re-education, forced labor, and organ harvesting of Uigher minorities in China today to the US internment of japanese in the 1940s.
Needless to say, both are bad, but if you need to reach back 75+ years in US history to find a comparable example, then the difference between the level of civil rights abuse in the two countries should be crystal clear.
It's obvious on the surface that the US still has many problems, but government sanctioned organ harvesting isn't one of them.
edit: Was curious, now I see the commenter above's account is only 3 months old, and exclusively comments on content regarding China.
Btw it looks like yours is supporting Trump propaganda. Wow pot calls kettle black.
Fight Fight Fight.
One could argue that a cacophony of opinions spanning the entire spectrum of possibilities isn't necessarily much better than having no freedom of press, if the end result is people literally believing deceptive propaganda, as opposed to merely being afraid of voicing informed, dissenting opinions.
IMHO, patriotism should be about defending the values of a country and calling out BS when it's appropriate, instead of merely defending the country's name without concern for the substance of the criticism.
They’re not even remotely the same. The U.S. has serious problems with racism, mass incarceration, police brutality, unaffordable health care, etc.
But that isn’t even close to the problems China has with organ harvesting, concentration camps in Xinjiang, mass corruption, food fraud, political prisoners etc.
The outcomes are radically different.
I would much rather be called a pragmatist than a patriot.
Both there and here, there's political work being done, each with their own ideas of what is best for their people. We can argue that their great firewall effort is oppressive for example, but on the other hand, they are probably more than happy the US has outsourced manufacturing to China to such an extensive degree. Both countries ostensibly "work as intended". I guess the end result of all that work still remains to be seen.
Another point that I think is worth pondering about is whether majority opinion is necessarily correct. The US response to covid, for example, has been all over the place, with places like San Francisco, CA being more strict and successful, to places like Minot, ND being hit really hard.
Like you, I'm also all for pragmatism, but I think things like the early perception of the epidemic in the west shows that sometimes the right course of action might sometimes fly in the face of public opinion.
So while I think you are quite wrong about the current risk, we are in complete agreement that freedom of speech should be vigilantly protected.
I suggest checking the US history, both somewhat recent and not recent at all. Cancel culture is just the continuation of the old tradition of "naming and shaming", it isn't something new.
First there was "tarring and feathering", then there were the witch hunts in MA, then, more recently, there was the red scare. Current "cancel culture" is pretty much just a much lighter version of that, and we are definitely not moving any closer to "full blown censorship". In fact, I think that the modern "cancel culture" (despite me being very much not a fan of it) cannot even hold a handle to the red scare investigations of just 60-70 years ago
I agree the prior penalty could be more severe but now everything is logged and the barrier to offend is low, IMO.
BLM: People at the bottom of our society are pooling their political power and changing the conversation about policing, police budgets, racism and racial divide.
Me too: Everyday women are being heard and taking down men of wealth and power.
Gay rights: a small minority has won equality in the eyes of the law and public opinion.
Occupy: Raised class consciousness and set the stage for political movements such as Trump, Bernie, and the Tea Party.
Based on your post, you must be very isolated from society if you think the improvements minorities have won are just fake news, telling you what what you want to hear.
The same thing, really? Like picking organs on political opponents in prisons? I didn't know the US was doing that.
The US is attempting to extradite someone for trial, not trying to harvest his organs.
The question is therefore not legality in itself, but whether the (US) laws themselves are sensible and/or egalitarian. It's implied by the OP that they aren't (and I personally agree).
Here's the wording of the HK-specific law: "The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People's Government, or theft of state secrets, to prohibit foreign political organisations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organisations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organisations or bodies."
Governments hold a monopoly on Force, not a monopoly on Truth.
It's different for people who do have a security clearance, because they signed away their First Amendment rights for classified information.
So then this appears to be the difference between the Manning/Assange and Snowden/Greenwald cases: both Manning and Snowden held security clearances and violated them by sharing with Assange and Greenwald. But while Assange may have solicited and/or assisted Manning's crime, Greenwald just passively received the materials from Snowden's crime. So Greenwald is innocent and Assange is prosecuted.
Also normal (non-government) NDAs let you sign away your right not to be punished for speaking about certain matters. I don't like it, but it's pretty well established.
Point is that—legally speaking—rights aren't actually inalienable.
Do you know the prominent cases of the examples you mentioned?
You can contract with another private entity to resolve disputes via arbitration, yes, but not with the state. The closest thing might be a plea agreement, but that happens after an indictment. You still have the right to a trial, but you may forego it if you choose.
I suppose if you're saying that a security clearance is like an NDA with the state, it's a reasonable comparison in function, but the means of prosecution is entirely different. It's like saying that everyone could be subject to UCMJ because of conscription.
Not sure if this would play the same in America.
There’s a huge difference between A) someone gets classified information through nefarious means and shares that with a journalist, and B) “journalist” actively works to steal said classified documents. This case is about “B” not “A” but yet we keep seeing people trying to make the argument that this is some sort of attack on journalism. That’s a gross misrepresentation of the basic facts in this case.
How do european (or perhaps just the UK's) legal system(s) work in that regard?
I have a lot of hope that this is a first crack appearing in the western cultural monolith; at some point civilized countries will have to somewhat politically break from the US so long as the US continues its domestic institutional torture programs (american prisons and the tradition of extended solitary confinement) and human rights violations (capital punishment). With luck that means that MLAT will eventually start to be unenforceable.
>How do european (or perhaps just the UK's) legal system(s) work in that regard?
I seriously had to read the headline twice, to make sure I'd got it right, I was so stunned at the UK not kowtowing to the US, as a matter of course.
I still wonder what the CIA must have done to get those Swedish prosecutors to spin all of that bullshit for the original arrest warrant.
I'd also have liked to have been a fly on the wall when the phone calls were made to those in charge of European airspace when Morales' jet was forcibly grounded over Austria for no reason other than the US incorrectly suspected Snowden being aboard.
What would it take to convince you this didn't actually happen? It still doesn't make legal sense - Obama's DOJ publicly declined to charge him given the evidence, and extradition from Sweden would still have required extradition from the UK since he would've been serving time in both countries.
Assange never got charged by the US administration he actually embarassed, successfully jumped bail, waited out the clock on the rape charges, and finally got his extradition denied. It seems to me he got everything he wanted out of this - he just wasn't careful what he wished for.
Which means very little - the fact that the US has now tried to extradite him proves that.
> extradition from Sweden would still have required extradition from the UK since he would've been serving time in both countries.
How so? AIUI Sweden would have notionally promised not to extradite him, but there was little mechanism to enforce this.
Ockham's razor also applies. If you want Assange charged in the US on 'espionage' or similar and you have a choice of notifying the Swedish authorities that he is wanted for serious crimes in the US or instead relying upon separate local allegations that are so vague the Swedish legal system has to work its way through an appeals process to even decide to whether to pursue the case or not whilst leaving him at liberty to leave the country, you're unlikely to choose the latter.
There were never any rape charges. Please get your facts correct before asserting falsehoods.
> A state wishing to prosecute a surrendered person for offences committed before his or her surrender, or extradite a surrendered person to a third state, must, subject to certain exception, obtain the permission of the executing judicial authority. Such a request is made in the same form as a European Arrest Warrant, and granted or refused using the same rules which determine whether surrender would be granted or refused.
It proves they care now, under a wildly different (and totally clownshoes) DOJ, which if anything lends more credence to the theory they did not care back then or we would have seen them try back then.
What it would take to convince me would be for Assange to not be literally fighting a US extradition order, right now.
What was always going to happen, is what is happening now.
If a person was one of the people who said things for years like "Well, actually, the US is not trying to extradite Assange", then they were completely and totally wrong, and should be embarrassed as to how they could have possible thought that.
Extradition requests are not platonic and timeless, they are issued by specific people for specific reasons at specific times.
This is was what always was going to happen. The motivation for the US to extradite him was always clear. And exactly what people predicted was going to happen, did indeed happen.
And the people who predicted otherwise were wrong, and should be made fun of for how wrong that they were, and how misinformed they were to think anything else could have happened.
The Obama administration prosecuted Manning, and would have had an equal amount of reason to prosecute Assange, and the extradition request is exactly what happened at the end of the day.
The only possible situation for me to believe that they were not prospecting Assange would have been if Obama simply pardoned Assange, which did not happen.
How exactly am I misinformed? What facts am I wrong on? What inconsistency is there if I believe that Obama's DOJ genuinely never intended to charge Assange with anything?
> The Obama administration prosecuted Manning, and would have had an equal amount of reason to prosecute Assange
No, because Manning and Assange did different things. A key claim in Assange's defense in this case is that Manning did all the illegal things!
> The only possible situation for me to believe that they were not prospecting Assange would have been if Obama simply pardoned Assange, which did not happen.
Obama repeatedly stated he would not pardon anyone not convicted of a crime (e.g. in the context of Snowden) and as far as I know held true to this for all 1927 of his pardons.[0] So why would he pardon Assange, who was not even accused of a crime?
What do you mean why? To prevent literally what is happening right now, and to make it impossible for any US government agency to ever prosecute either Assange or Snowden.
Thats why! Because he is subject to an extradition request. All of that could have been prevented, with a pardon.
This is Kafkaesque levels of reasoning here. Literally what was predicted was going to happen, did indeed happen.
And every justification for "Well, why would you pardon someone who is not being arrested", is literally proven wrong, because this is what ended up happening! The current state of Assange is the proof and the reason why everyone who was arguing against a pardon were wrong.
> Obama repeatedly stated he would not pardon anyone not convicted of a crime
Yes, because he wanted those people to be sent to jail. Because of the efforts that he was doing to get them sent to jail. Thats why. Obama could have stopped all this stuff from happening, but he didn't. Thats the evidence.
There were never any charges in Sweden.
You are essentially implying that "District Judge Vanessa Baraitser" is making a political calculation -- under pressure from who? At her own discretion?
Do you have ANY evidence to suggest the judge is corrupt? Because isn't that is exactly what you're implying, isn't it?
Given that this is the UK, with a fairly reputable court system, let's assume the judge made a ruling on the basis of the reasoning she gave, quote: "Faced with the conditions of near total isolation without the protective factors which limited his risk at HMP Belmarsh, I am satisfied the procedures described by the US will not prevent Mr Assange from finding a way to commit suicide and for this reason I have decided extradition would be oppressive by reason of mental harm and I order his discharge."
But why would british politicians get involved. Regardless of how they got involved it would be political suicide if they were caught doing so.
British politicians have very little to win by getting their hands dirty here. For them it would be preferable to tell the Americans that they can't interfere.
Seriously, UK politicians have a perfect excuse for not having to make a choice and take a political risk -- they are not allowed to!
Give a politician the option of passing a hot potato to someone else, and you can be sure they'll pass the potato :)
Let's just say that his ownership of the NY Jets is one of the less embarrassing points on his resume: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Johnson
Well, it does and it doesn't.
After all, why should today's politicians feel they owe you a favour just because you helped their predecessors? George W Bush may have warm feelings about the UK after Blair helped him with the war in Iraq, but would you expect to cash that favour in with Obama, Trump or Biden?
Of course not - A new president comes in, they decide to impose new tariffs on imports from the UK, of course something that happened 17 years and two presidents ago doesn't give him much pause.
Obviously there are longstanding structures of cooperation like NATO and suchlike, which don't get reset. But an awful lot does.
Besides, Assange is old news now. America's message to other would-be whistleblowers has been delivered. If the UK releases him, no American politicians will have to face scrutiny or look weak over the decision. And British politicians won't face any domestic blowback, post Harry Dunn.
This is because binding precedent is only set by the appellate courts and while this judgment is persuasive, other judges sitting in this court can ignore it since they're not bound to follow it.
The appellate courts are generally there to resolve legal questions not factual ones—I'd question the Assange case, or other similar cases would raise a similar legal rather than factual question.
There has been a trend towards applying s91 cases for defendants with autism spectrum disorders: the courts didn't in Gary McKinnon's case, but the Home Secretary (Theresa May, before she became PM) justified her denial of the extradition order on that basis. In Lauri Love's case, the magistrates' court allowed the extradition order but it was overturned on appeal in the High Court on the basis of Love's not being able to cope in US custody with Asperger's syndrome. In the Assange case, the magistrates' court followed this established and rather persuasive precedent.
Court originally ruled that extradition can happen, but the appeals court ruled differently, citing that extradition would be "oppressive by reason of his physical and mental condition".
As far as I'm aware the case never made it to the Supreme Court.
It's actually European law that's binding here, and extradition / deportation denials based on human rights concerns are nothing new - there have been bans on deportations even to EU members such as Greece (https://www.gesetze-bayern.de/Content/Document/Y-300-Z-BECKR...) or Hungary (https://www.keienborg.de/2018/02/19/die-12-kammer-des-vg-due...).
There's post-Brexit significance since the UK continues to be a signatory to the ECHR even though they've now left the EU. Being an ECHR signatory is a requirement of being in the EU, not vice versa. (Countries like Turkey and Russia are also ECHR signatories.)
I wouldn't be surprised if this had gone very differently had Trump won.
EDIT: Assange is 49, which makes the GP 48, and the mystery of his age is now solved.
"Should Assange die in a UK prison, as the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has warned, he will effectively have been tortured to death."
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Julian has a very rating personality, that goes without saying, but I cannot see a single erson who is still alive that has done so much to help disclose these atrocious crimes to the Public and has risked his life to help other whistler blowers than him.
Our false narrative of heroes don't actually exist, and the resolve and conviction to some of the most impactful things in regards to Freedom of Information and disclosing classified information isn't going to be from some polished Captain America figure. it only makes sense it was from someone like Assange who has pretty much lived his entire life from a young age in some form of activism as a result of his Mother.
I'm going to bypass the CCP v US thing as my stance is clear and u/dang has already told me that I take things too far with little to no benefit. But suffice it to say the two are similar but not compatible systems, the US still has the ability to re-direct it's course as it slips further into abject authoritarianism where as the CCP cannot exist without it.
Well, Chelsea Manning was the actual whistleblower in this situation. She also went back to jail for refusing to testify against Assange. (Conversely Assange said he would turn himself in if Manning was given clemency, then obviously did not when her first sentence was commuted.)
Reality Winner is also still in prison, due to The Intercept's egregious mishandling of her leaks.
Granted, Manning was the one who provided Wikileaks the files. But, lets not omit that Sara Harrison and Julian were critical in getting Edward out of Hong Kong and his gravitas made the Bitcoin community to go against Satoshi and donated to keep Wikileaks alive and made all of this possible.
Cypherpunks are not going to live up to people's ideal image but they sure as hell get a lot done. And Julian is yet another reminder of that fact.
> Reality Winner is also still in prison, due to The Intercept's egregious mishandling of her leaks.
To be fair it was shared amounts of mishandling [0], which for someone who worked as an NSA contractor in cryptology related fields should have some understanding of OPSEC; but maybe she rished it and hoped they would do it on their end?
I'm not victim blaming, and the Intercept clearly dropped the ball and should have sat on it and taken care of this before running it. But this is why I think Defcon and the CCC should be mandatory watching for people in and especially in tech before anyone decides to do involved in 'hacktivism' or anything like it.
In fact, in the early days of Bitcoin they wanted to create an anonymous drop for journalists and leaders that would pay bounties to gray/white hats to do go over these kind of things, but this opened the door to so much foul play that it was dropped all together. Still, I hope Reality takes solace in knowing that Trump will be out of office when she gets out, but that her Obama bias was probably not everything she thought it was when you look at the amount of Whistleblower cases that were prosecuted.
Either way, I hope she is well and that the Intercept do the honourable thing make amends and give her a well paid role there.
0: https://xorl.wordpress.com/2017/11/21/opsec-fail-reality-win...
She worked at Meade as a linguist during her time as an airman, and after in an even more detached role as a translator. Neither in a cryptology-related field unless you consider the entirety of SIGINT to be cryptology-related (and her contract job wasn't even SIGINT).
Leaking should not be reserved for those with technical skills; anonymity is one of the aspects real journalists should consider themselves bound to help their sources with.
> her Obama bias
Sure, ok, yeah. Whatever dude.
> Leaking should not be reserved for those with technical skills; anonymity is one of the aspects real journalists should consider themselves bound to help their sources with.
Are you not at all familiar with the relationship Ed had with Glen Greenwald? I taught my mom how to use PGP over text and that was entirely painful, so I can relate, even though the thing is my Life wasn't on the line with the World's biggest intelligence agencies were after me.
Journalists have a responsibility to protect their sources, and the Intercept having had Ed, Laura Poitras and Greenwall all on their staff at one point you'd think this would be a part of a basic training. But then again, that may be why they also left?
But even as a person with a healthy sense of paranoia and understanding of OPSEC, true anonymity is a pipe-dream in this perverse panopticon that's been created and emphasizes why we need to build another a new Internet.
> Sure, ok, yeah. Whatever dude.
Shrug... you want to pretend that isn't a massive blind-spot that's up to you.
Making heroes out of corrupt members of the State, politicians, is in large part how we got to this situation in the first place. And that includes the normalization of 'rendition' black sites, torture, and 'extra judicial' killings of US Citizens and their children under Obama.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/us/Russian-interference-a...
> Mr McKinnon is accused of serious crimes. But there is also no doubt that he is seriously ill [...] He has Asperger's syndrome, and suffers from depressive illness. Mr McKinnon's extradition would give rise to such a high risk of him ending his life that a decision to extradite would be incompatible with Mr McKinnon's human rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_McKinnon#British_governme...
So the UK now has 2 trading cards and the US has none to exchange them with. Also they previously disposed this card, most probably a win-win situation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert) https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jul/16/david-kelly...
And nothing else.
I see this as UK stalling till Biden comes in power. They fear Trump might just pardon him.
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/39568370275766272...
Also, what the fuck? That's not even a sentence. Was it so hard to find someone who could construct coherent sentences?
https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/512209-trump-sa...
Chatter has been at couple of discord servers I am on. It has been going on for long. But since Biden's win, it has picked up steam.
Trump has always avoided the whole Snowden Assange wikileaks saga - for a guy with too much to say, it's interesting to note.
Obama was quite tough on Snowden and Biden will continue. Trump will just do it out of spite against Obama & Dems and also hoping to get more followers with good hacking skills. Trump will do the right thing for all the wrong reasons.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/24/so-far-trum...
However, I would like to see Assange pardoned. I'm sure he has some interesting information he hasn't yet released.
A lack of a large number of pardons is no surprise, really. By all appearances, he's pardoning his partners in crime and war criminals. Traditionally, pardons are granted to folks who haven't gotten a fair shake, or whose sentences are disproportionate to their crimes. Contrast the number of pardons with the recent spree of executions -- this is all in line with the "tough on crime" narrative. Forget about justice, the goal is brutality and death to the enemy.
1. I think the US has pretty much succeeded in their goal of essentially canceling Julian Assange. Being holed up for years in the Ecuadorian Embassy had to have taken a toll mentally. As much as some might say it's not prison, it effectively is.
2. There's an interesting question of where the line is between journalist and not journalist. As much as some might argue otherwise, being a "journalist" doesn't mean you can break the law. And yes there's a difference between publishing classified material that comes to you vs actively engaging in, supporting and enabling the behaviour that led to obtaining that material. Assange clearly had prior knowledge of Manning's actions and was more of an accomplice. Being a "journalist" isn't a defense here, at least not a legal one;
3. Here's my other issue with treating Assange as a journalist: he was clearly playing politics. You saw this in the Democratic email hacking and publication. This undermines the whole theory that Wikileaks was somehow different, impartial or open. It is and always was another tool to further a political end. At some point you aren't a journalist anymore;
4. The UK court upheld all the prosecution's points of law so it really was simply a matter of health grounds. I honestly don't know how an appeals court will treat that. I guess we'll see.
5. Interestingly I think Brexit works against Assange here. I don't believe this case can be appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (or Justice?). Obviously the UK isn't in the EU anymore but I don't know the law well enough here. Like it might be that the case was brought while the UK was an EU member so it's possible the ECHR/ECJ has jurisdiction? Probably not but it's not impossible.
6. It's unlikely the incoming Biden administration is going to be sympathetic towards Assange. There's probably no will to spend political capital on that and the Democrats are probably still made about Assange's (active) role in the email hacking and the 2016 election.
The ECHR still has jurisdiction over the UK, at least until the UK cancels the relevant treaties which it now can do outside the EU
> Lewis You have as a journalist merely been the passive recipient of official information. Presumably you have never done anything criminal to obtain government information?
> Hager You said “passive”. That is not the way we work. Journalists not only actively work our sources. We go out and find our sources. The information might come in documents. It might come on a memory stick. In most cases our sources are breaking the law. Our duty is to help protect them from being caught. We actively help them cover their backs sometimes.
In point 3 you're convinced that the timing for releasing the Democratic papers was related to undermining the presidential bid intentionally. However I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume that an impartial journalist would release sooner rather than later documents that pertain to a current developing event. Withholding them would have been "actively" getting involved in the presidential election. I think the blame for the leak lays solely with the people that leaked them, not with Wikileaks or Assange.
(Also, I see that someone else already clarified the situation about the European Court of Human Rights.)
[1] https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-...
How should 2016 Bernie supporters feel seeing the leaked emails showing the establishment conspiring against him? “Political” in the pejorative really depends on which side you’re one.
Wikileaks is/was a threat to the establishment. That’s why he’s currently locked up.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/damaging-emails-dnc-wikileak...