The United States government has offered assurances to England’s High Court over Julian Assange, requested by judges after the WikiLeaks founder sought leave to appeal his extradition.
The court asked the U.S. to provide assurances the Australian would not be executed and afforded the same First Amendment protections as a U.S. citizen if extradited to stand trial. Assurances were sent before a Tuesday deadline, but Assange’s wife has complained they are riddled with “weasel words.”
“The United States has issued a non-assurance in relation to the First Amendment, and a standard assurance in relation to the death penalty,” she argued.
“It makes no undertaking to withdraw the prosecution’s previous assertion that Julian has no First Amendment rights because he is not a U.S. citizen. Instead, the U.S. has limited itself to blatant weasel words claiming that Julian can ‘seek to raise’ the First Amendment if extradited.”
She added that the U.S. note “does nothing to relieve our family’s extreme distress about [Assange’s] future – his grim expectation of spending the rest of his life in isolation in US prison for publishing award-winning journalism.”
While the diplomatic note provided by the U.S. clearly states a “sentence of death will neither be sought nor imposed on Assange,” the language around the First Amendment seems more equivocal. It states only that he will have “the ability to raise and seek to rely upon” the First Amendment at trial but that deciding whether or not it applies “is exclusively within the purview of the U.S. courts.”
A hearing to debate whether or not the assurances meet the High Court’s requirements has been scheduled for May 20.
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