A barbarical nature of US penal system it is, but they did not even note a prima fascie political nature of the prosecution when the defence was slashing it left, and right.
They omitted it very deliberately.
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/julian-assange-is-kept-u...
>> "Each day Julian is woken at 5 am, handcuffed, put in holding cells, stripped naked, and x-rayed. He is transported 1.5 hours each way in what feels like a vertical coffin in a claustrophobic van,” Morris said.
>> The lawyer pointed out that during the criminal hearings Assange is kept in a glass box at the back of court from where he cannot his lawyers properly.
Wait, what? This can't be true - daily x-rays would guarantee cell/DNA damage.
I can't vouch for the analysis here, but this is interesting. It's an FOIA request that seems to show the equipment being used. https://wiseupaction.info/2020/10/15/julian-assange-was-x-ra...
[0] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/the-daily-need/how-muc...
The difference in intensity is 3,600 fold. It's the difference between being subjected to 1 hour of 30 degree celcius heat and 1 second of 108,000 degree celcius heat.
On the other hand: I expect 500 ms of such extreme heat would instantly kill a human, although I'm having a hard time finding an answer for such a short time scale. Since X-ray imaging doesn't instantly kill, it's apples and oranges, but point taken.
[1] https://radiopaedia.org/articles/dose-limits?lang=us
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5019040/
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S165836551...
Ionizing radiation damage is overwhelmingly and almost exclusively in its cumulative effects, namely the cancer it can cause. Each “unit” of radiation has a certain likelihood of slicing through the DNA of one of your cells, which has a certain likelihood of causing a mutation, which has a certain likelihood of being a cancerous mutation and not a “kills the cell” mutation, which has a certain likelihood of being a specific type that can evade all the body’s natural defenses against rouge cells. It is a long chain of dice rolls that have to all go just wrong.
So, unless the dose is concentrated to a physical location, e.g. radon in the lungs or sunburn on the skin, then it doesn’t really matter if you get a given dose over a month or a year. It will still start the same number of cascading dice rolls.
If someone that actually knows what they are talking about feels the need to correct anything, please do.
So... somewhat disingenuous.
Those all stem from the US though, I think he's only detained by the UK for extradition?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictment_and_arrest_of_Julia...
You are correct in a way -- judges do not decide issues that do not need to be decided, and things they do say about those issues are ignored, so yes, she omitted to discuss it.
But you couldn't say she "sided with US prosecutors" on whether it was a political offence or not. If you put that language in the Extradition Act, then you would get a decision on it. It's not so much "chilling for investigative journalism" as a deficiency in the Act itself not accounting for the particular US-UK treaty language or the US' categorisation under the Act that should reflect its recent anti-democratic bent.
And that's a bad thing as it leaves the case more or less open to US side coming up with "We promise to put him in some VIP jail with blackjack, and hookers," and more opportunities for retrials for state attorney to attack weaker defense arguments one at a time.
Having the extradition flopped as political, would've closed the door on it for good.
There’s a difference, as I’m sure you’re now aware having stopped accusing her of being extremely suspect, between judgments that are simply annoying for your team, and producing utterly biased, pre-decided results that match the tie of the President that nominated you. You’ll find that the former happened here, and the latter isn’t nearly as big a problem in the UK as you seem to have assumed to be the case.
There's a difference between legally meaningful findings and lobbing opinion on legally non-germane questions.
> Including: “This conduct would amount to offences in English law”
That's a determination the court is called on to make in an extradition case under Section 137 of the Extradition Act.
The conduct being refereed to is part of the issue many people are having here. As the defense argued the conduct is that of an investigative journalist. If such conduct constitutes an offense in the law, then some are worried that there is precedent to charge a wider range of conduct then previously though possible. Weather this is true or not remains to be seen I guess. Either way its a meaningful determination that this judge made.
Hypothetically, let’s say the statute actually had a section with “no extraditions for unsavoury offences” in it. That’s pretty weird and ambiguous, so you might, subject to UK law on statutory interpretation, look to the treaty/treaties the Act is implementing to figure out what the legislature meant by unsavoury when they wrote it. Maybe a bunch of treaties had similar provisions using the word unsavoury, but the US one changed it, and you would analyse why they didn’t use the language again, or whether political offences as referred to by the US treaty would fit the bill... But according to the judgment, the Act is not ambiguous. There is nothing to look to the treaty for.
Still, the basis for the extradition is not the treaty. Treaties bind States (ie countries) against each other. The remedy for a treaty law breach is stern words from the UN, maybe a fine, whatever. But treaty law cannot establish domestic laws that govern things like extradition. The only requirement imposed by the treaty is on the UK as a State to implement the treaty in domestic law, which is how countries like the UK comply with the terms of the treaty. International law does not bind local decision makers who decide whether the extradition goes ahead. It also does not bind parliament, which can refuse to implement a treaty or decide to deviate from it. It should also be quite plain that Assange is not a State party to the extradition agreement, being neither the literal United States nor Kingdom, so he does not have standing to object to the UK’s implementation, and of course, is in utterly the wrong court for that :)
(That the UK is bound to comply makes for a strong suggestion that parliament actually intended to be true to the treaty when they implemented it, but this is only relevant where there is ambiguity in the domestic law requiring resolution, because of the primacy of legislative power and its ability to write laws in clear terms that can’t be wriggled out of.)
> But treaty law cannot establish domestic laws that govern things like extradition
In the US, treaties are law. The political offense exception absolutely applies when extraditing people from the US to the UK.
There are enough other problems in this ruling to make me very skeptical of the judge's reasoning here. A few of them:
* The judge says that it's an open question whether or not a journalist from The Guardian was the person who first published unredacted cables with informants' names. As was established beyond any doubt, it was The Guardian's journalist who first published the cables. The decryption key was the title of a chapter in his book, for crying out loud, and the encrypted archive was available online. Yet Baraitser treats this as an open question. Doing so allows Baraitser to argue that Assange put people's lives at risk.
* The judge asserts that Pompeo's statements about going after Assange do not represent the views of the US government, and therefore cannot be used to argue that the prosecution is politically motivated. Pompeo is the former director of the CIA and the current Secretary of State. He's one of the most senior members of the government, and he gave an entire speech devoted to arguing that the government should go after Assange.
To me, these are just unbelievable statements by the judge. The bottom line, though, is that the judge's ruling makes it possible for the US to go after investigative journalists in the UK who publish about the US military or intelligence apparatus. All the protections that journalists thought they had do not exist.
Sure, in the US they are. The judge explicitly contrasts the US’s “monist” system with the UK’s “dualist” system where treaties are not law. Correspondingly, in the US treaties require Congressional approval to be ratified. In the UK, at least prior to 2010, treaties could be ratified by the executive branch alone, but Parliament’s approval was required to incorporate the terms into national law. (As of 2010, Parliament has a greater role in treaty ratification [1], but AFAICT that still doesn’t make them automatically national law. Anyway, the treaty in question was ratified prior to 2010.)
[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn05...
In Britain and Australia, they're not. (Except for the Tasmanian Dams Case.) Parliament has to, in effect, cut and paste the treaty into legislation, and only then will courts enforce it. Sometimes parliament refuses to do that, and sometimes they try but slip up.
The Treaty does not limit extradition permitted under other law, it creates an obligation. If another law requires extradition, the terms of the treaty are immaterial.
> In the US, treaties are law.
They are a kind of law, but unless they are “self-executing” treaties, they aren't law with much practical force until and except to the extent that implementing legislation is adopted.
Now, IIRC, extradition treaties have generally been held to be self-executing in US law, but it's simply not generally the case that treaties are automatically judicially-enforceable laws in the US without separate legislative action.
> The political offense exception absolutely applies when extraditing people from the US to the UK.
The US statute law governing extradition also allows extradition outside of any extradition treaties, but in far more limited circumstances (mostly,for non-US citizens/nationals who are alleged to have committed crimes against US citizens or nationals) than UK law does. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here except that the domestic law of the United States is not identical to that of the United Kingdom, which is unsurprising.
That the judge is making a novel argument that there is no longer any barrier to extraditing people from the UK to the US for political offenses, despite what it clearly says in the treaty. As I understand it, this is a contentious issue, and most commentators had previously expected the political offenses exception to hold. The argument that the judge made - that the terms set out in extradition treaties are irrelevant in extradition hearings - does not appear to be as straightforwardly accepted as you're claiming. My understanding is that the Extradition Act of 2003 itself, without the treaty, is not sufficient to extradite Assange. If the treaty with the US did not also exist, there would be no extradition to the US. So to argue that the defendant derives no protections from the text of the treaty is quite a strange argument.
If people can now be extradited from the UK to the US for political offenses, that is a major development with extremely worrying consequences. Now that the US is treating national security reporting as espionage, if UK journalists are no longer protected by the traditional political offenses exception, they are open to prosecution in the US.
Calling it “novel”, “strange”, “contentious”, going against what “commentators” expected (who? why do we care?), etc are all pretty much just your opinion, man. All you’re really saying is that you still don’t understand how you can have two different kinds of law and have them operate in different ways, which is perfectly okay. It’s tricky. I don’t think this HN thread is going to do a better job of figuring out if the judgment is right about the EA2003 being self-contained than the actual UK appellate court system. If we dive any deeper than “there are different kinds of law and here are the ways they usually interact” then even those of us here with law degrees are out of our depth without doing way too much research for HN.
But rather than directing your ire at today’s legal reality at this judge, maybe you should be angry that the EA2003, rushed through Parliament in the wake of 9/11 with very little scrutiny as is SOP for almost all NatSec legislation floated in western democracies since then, appears to cut off the protection against extraditions of political offences for anyone — terrorists or journalists - despite this being a common exception in treaties and I think may have been a significant part of the old scheme. Just skimming old reports I think this problem may have been raised but not addressed before passage. As I said in my first post, this is a deficiency of the EA2003, not a judge making up “novel arguments” (afaik this has never been actually tested since the EA passed, so you can’t really call it novel) and creating a problem. The problem has been there for 17 years.
If your point is that there is in fact an express importation of the various treaties’ terms into UK law, you need to point to the words in an Act of Parliament that say that. If your point is that the threshold requirement in the first section of Part 2 of the Act that a treaty relation exist actually constitutes an importation of treaty terms, or that an express importation is not actually required for this kind of thing, then go ahead and argue that based on UK statutory interpretation law. The defence didn’t manage it, but I look forward to seeing their attempt in any appeal proceedings. It’s not really obvious how “Extradition to the US is enabled by this treaty” is an argument for either; you’re only really saying it meets the threshold requirement, which was a given. You have to argue based on the words in the Act and UK law first, and your instinct about what treaties should mean second.
Edit: While you’re at it, you’ll have to rebut quite a lot of points about the intention of Parliament in EA2003, when it deliberately omitted the previous domestic implementation of treaties that refer to political offences. Read the judgment 41-63 over and over to see what you’re up against.
Basic UK constitutional law: judges apply the law as written by Parliament, not the law as it ought to be written if the treaty had been properly implemented. If this leads to the UK not following their obligations, the remedy for this is Parliament need to modify primary legislation to satisfy their international obligations. All treaties need ratification by Parliament.
(There are two major exceptions to this: the European Convention of Human Rights which was "domesticated" by the Human Rights Act 1998, and EU law which, pre-Brexit, was brought into UK law by the European Communities Act, and has now been integrated into UK law through the EU Withdrawal Act.)