Craig Murray's Blog, page 14

Scotland’s Hate Speech Act and Abuse of Process

On 1 April Scotland’s notorious Hate Crime Act comes into force. I have explained before why it is so noxious. It has been condemned by every civil liberties body you can think of. Police Scotland have made matters still worse by telling their officers that the measure of whether a Hate Crime has been committed should be whether the person reporting it feels offended or threatened, and that the officer should make no objective judgment as to whether that is reasonable from the facts of the case.

But I want to concentrate on one very specific aspect of this legislation. It will apply to social media, and indeed it is highly probable that a very significant proportion of the “Hate Speech” will be found on social media.

It is a well establsihed principle in Scots law that anything published on the internet, which can be read in Scotland, is deemed to be published in Scotland. The act of publication is not deemed to be the person actually publishing the item, let us say in Tahiti. The act of publication is deemed to be the reader opening the item on their device in Scotland.

(To emphasise the total illogic of this approach, while it is the person opening it which constitutes the act of publication, it is not the person who opened it who is deemed to have published it but the original creator/publisher. To emphasise the state’s dishonest thinking still more, if however what is being opened is not, say, libel or hate speech but rather illegal pornography, then it is in that case the person who opened it who is deemed to have published it).

So a person in Tahiti who publishes a tweet which is opened by and offends somebody in Scotland because it offends a protected characteristic, had committed a crime in Scotland, even though they never left their home in Tahiti and may never have been anywhere near Scotland.

I know this sounds completely crazy, but I do assure you it is absolutely true. As kindly confirmed here by the Dean of Faculty.

Craig is absolutely correct here. If it’s published online and read in Scotland then – in law – it is published in Scotland.

— Roddy Dunlop KC (@RoddyQC) March 15, 2024

This means, beyond a doubt, that hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of new crimes will be committed in Scotland every year from 1 April. Committed in Scotland by people who were, at the time, all over the world.

If you think that is bad, let me tell you it gets infinitely worse. In addition to holding that Scots courts have jurisdiction over anything published on the internet anywhere in the world, because if it can be read here it is published in Scotland, Scottish judges have also invented the doctrine of “continuing publication”.

As it is the act by the reader of opening the matter online which constitutes publication, every time it is opened by someone in Scotland from the internet that constitutes a new publication. So any “hate speech” that has been online for ten years constitutes a new offence if you read it in Scotland now. “Hate speech” as defined in the Act, anywhere on the Internet, no wonder when or where it was published, is going to be a new crime in Scotland if someone opens it or reads it after 1 April.

What I have said is simply true. It is irrefutable. There may sometimes be argument over who committed the crime – for example, it may sometimes be the author or sometimes the publisher who is guilty, (though on social media they are in most instances deemed the same person). But that a crime has been committed in Scotland is not in doubt.

So how will Police Scotland and the Crown Office cope?

Through selective prosecution. With literally millions of available criminal offences being committed annually, the authorities have fantastic latitude to choose who and who not to pursue.

In theory of course all crime should be pursued equally. In practice that will be impossible. Scotland will have put itself into this impossible situation by the combination of two terrible bits of law. Scotland’s legal doctrine on internet publication is appalling and Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Act is appalling. The combination of the two is almost indescribably bad.

Scotland’s internet doctrine that the entire internet is published in Scotland if you read it here, is a claim of universal jurisdiction over the internet. It should be derided into vanishing.

But the internet posed a dilemma for the courts. EIther they had to accept a massive increase in freedom of speech, or claim jurisdiction over the entire internet. How do you enforce an injunction if somebody can simply publish the information from their home in Tahiti and you cannot touch them? Needless to say, the stupid and arrogant judges of Scotland went for the universal jurisdiction path and not the freedom path (to be plain, so have the courts in England and Wales).

There is however a real problem here. Outside the UK, Scottish judges can only get their hands on our “criminal” from Tahiti if they happen to come here, or by extradition. But extradition depends on the principle of dual criminality – the act has to be a criminal offence in the country being extradited both to and from. As there are few countries in the world willing to jail you for telling a story that starts “An Englishman, Scotsman and Irishman went into a pub”, extradition will be difficult in most cases.

It will, incidentally, certainly be an imprisonable offence in Scotland from 1 April to tell a joke beginning “An Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman went into a pub”. The police just need someone to complain.

But this opens a very interesting question with England and Wales. Plainly there is an enormous amount of online social interaction between Scots and people in England and Wales. The Scottish courts do not need to extradite people from England and Wales, the police just truss them up and deliver them. But is England really going to accept that a woman sitting at home in Leicester, who made a bad taste joke online whilst in Leicester that is perfectly legal in England, can be sent to Scotland and imprisoned?

Did anybody actually think that through in passing this Act through the Scottish Parliament?

The Hate Crime Act makes it a criminal offence to insult somebody. You can go to jail for seven years for insulting somebody. That does not have to be your own insult. It includes by “displaying, publishing, distributing” “giving, sending, showing, playing” or “making the material available”. It includes giving someone an album that contains offensive lyrics, or acting in a performance that contains offensive lines. It really does.

 

The most basic notion of liberty has been discarded.

To make plain the culture wars motivation, three of the six protected characteristics are sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics. I genuinely do not know what the last one means. It does not mean being male or female. Strangely enough it will still be perfectly legal to insult women or men.

Rather worryingly, much of the opposition to the bill comes from people who want to make more things illegal, rather than give the state less arbitrary power to bang up huge numbers of people.

The truth is that this appalling legislation was always a part of Nicola Sturgeon’s grand scheme to destroy the Scottish Independence movement from within through culture wars. Everybody sentient in Scotland knows that the entire intention is a massive abuse of process. Of the millions of people who could be prosecuted for online content read in Scotland, the intention is selectively to attack those who are gender critical.

Now I am in fact not gender critical myself. I still find the intolerance puzzling. But I absolutely defend the right of those who are convinced that trans people are a threat to womens’ rights to state their position, free from the legal harrassment that is about to be unleashed upon them.

What we are seeing is terrible repressive legislation, amplified by a terrible legal doctrine, leading to massive power by the state over individuals. We are going to see monumental abuse of process. The state will take completely arbitrary decisions on selective prosecution according to a state political agenda, and will refuse to prosecute millions of other “crimes” under the same Act. This is fascism.

In the short term, I have no doubt that the Israeli lobby will be generating thousands of complaints of alleged anti-semitism aimed at those criticising Israel for its genocide. There is an extremely high correlation between Scottish unionism and zionism which doubtless will be in play.

The situation contradicts, at the very least, article 1, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10 and 17 of the European Convention on Human Rights. A nightmare is coming.

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Assange Truth and UN Shenanigans

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/video.mp4

I spent the last week at the UN, trying to ram home some truths about the Assange case as input to the UN’s Periodic Review (every 7 years) of the UK’s human rights record, in terms of its compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

I had a very short opportunity to address the UN Committee on Human Rights, which is a body of elected experts. In such a short time frame you have to go with just a couple of points. I am open to criticism of my selection, but I maintain that this was much plainer speaking than is generally heard. The reasons for this are interesting.

There are fora like this where registered NGOs can make their point. Human rights is quite an industry in Geneva, where literally hundreds of NGO reps live and roam the UN buildings. The favoured NGOs are those with ECOSOC registration status. The delegates of UNESCO status NGOs have blue passes and extremely free access throughout, at any time.

But UNESCO status is granted by a committee of member states – and is difficult to get. It is therefore unsurprising that a high proportion of NGOs are not real NGOs at all. They are astroturf; fake NGOs paid to whitewash the record of their governments. I did not understand this at first until I attended (as a dry run for the UK) the meetings of the Human Rights Committee for the Egyptian periodic review. Several Egyptian NGOs, one after the other, told us what a great respect for human rights the Egyptian dictatorship has. (It has, incidentally, just sentenced another group of opposition figures to death, after murdering Egypt’s only ever freely elected President.)

Even well-known western NGOs tend to pull their punches at the UN because, bluntly, almost all of them receive large amounts of funding from Western governments. While theoretically this is funding to attack the human rights record of the western governments’ designated enemies, it is a concomitant that the NGOs are reluctant seriously to bite the hand that feeds them.

Consider these facts: firstly, no important whistleblower has ever subsequently found employment with an established NGO. A great many have tried.

Secondly, had I not been there, nobody would have mentioned Julian Assange in the periodic review of the UK’s human rights record.

Money talks in the UN itself too. The US and Western powers contribute a very high proportion of the UN budget. There is a reason why I attended a commemoration ceremony in Geneva for UN staff killed in Gaza, where none of the senior UN staff dared to mention who killed them.

Also of course the NATO powers and allies are disproportionately represented in key staff positions.

The UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, an Austrian, has been disgustingly pusillanimous on Gaza and has done nothing on Assange. I spoke with a member of his staff who regurgitated to me a number of detailed US prosecution talking points on Assange which are simply factually incorrect. They have been thoroughly briefed.

Staff are visibly afraid to take on the UK/US interest. I met a number of UN staff who were happy to chat away until I brought up Assange; then they quite literally physically recoiled, in some cases took an actual step back, and always discovered they had pressing business elsewhere.

After the Human Rights Committee meeting with NGOs, the committee then met with the UK government representatives to discuss their concerns. One member of the committee, Rodrigo Carasco of Costa Rica, decided he would raise the case of Julian Assange, based on the briefing which we had supplied. A full elected member of the committee, Carasco is also the former Costa Rican Ambassador to the United Nations.

Carasco was put on the speakers’ list and he informed the committee what he was going to raise. Come the meeting with the UK delegation, Amb. Carasco was astonished when the Chair simply skipped over him in the speaking list and did not call him. He caught the Chair’s eye several times as the meeting progressed but still was not called, then it wound up and the Chair went to the UK delegation to respond to the bland and generic points which had been raised.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/IMG_0804.mp4

In this short video, when it first cuts away from the Chair you can see the white-haired Amb Carasco rising from his seat to remonstrate with her. She then disappears off the next shot while they had a pretty pointed exchange. I am sorry it is off camera; you will have to take my word for it.

My conclusion from this is that the UK and US are currently very sensitive to international criticism over Assange, and that rather than be discouraged we need to keep pushing. As both the US and UK are becoming international pariah states over Gaza, we need to remind the world of their long established crimes.

 

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A Tour d’Horizon on Swiss Box

Assange, Gaza, the manipulation of “anti-semitism”, threats to civil liberties, Galloway, the forms of armed resistance available to the colonised: I enjoy the long-form interview as a chance to explore issues in depth. This one was very enjoyable, and we didn’t get through half of Antoine’s list of topics.

I do hope that you can find time at least to dip in to this discussion of what I am doing and thinking at the moment.

You can check out the Swiss Box’s excellent catalogue here.

 
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The Panic Of the Ruling Class

I have known George Galloway my entire adult life, although we largely lost touch in the middle bit while I was off diplomating. I know George too well to mistake him for Jesus Christ, but he has been on the right side against appalling wars which the entire political class has cheer-led. His natural gifts of mellifluence and loquacity are unsurpassed, with an added talent for punchy phrase making.

He can be fiercely pugnacious in debate and always refuses to let the media set the frame of discussion, which requires an appetite for confrontation that is harder than you might think; it is not a skill I share. But outwith the public gaze George is humorous, kind and self-aware. He has been deeply involved in politics his entire life, and is a great believer in the democratic process as the ultimate way by which the working classes will ultimately take control of the means of production. He is a very old-fashioned and courteous form of socialist.

I have to confess I have never shared the romantic view of the working classes, and have always found them in reality more likely to follow the doctrines of Nigel Farage than those of John MacLean. But George Galloway is imbued in a native democratic socialist tradition. He is a descendant of the Chartists. You cannot get more British nor more ardent a democrat than George Galloway.

Which is why I found surreal the panic at his election in Rochdale and the claim, by the Prime Minister no less, that this was an assault on “British values” and even on democracy itself.

The idea that democracy – i.e. voting for somebody – is an attack on, err, democracy was so crazy that, had we any kind of independent media, it would have been ridiculed to death.

That of course has not happened. We are sonorously told we are a nation in crisis. Ordinary forms of democratic activity – free assembly, free speech and free voting – all threaten our society.

The cause of all of this political panic is of course the genocide in Gaza. It is essential to join the dots here. We live in a situation where the wealth gap in society between the rich and the poor is expanding at its fastest ever rate. Where for the first time in centuries, young adults can expect to have lower life expectations in terms of employment, education, health and housing than their parents. Where the nexus of control by the ultra-wealthy of both the political and media classes is tighter than ever.

Where the Overton Window has shrunk to a letterbox.

Briefly, the chance of the kind of democratic triumph of the working people of which George Galloway dreams, became real with the popular uprising that led to Jeremy Corbyn being placed as Labour leader. Corbyn’s chances were destroyed by an entirely fake narrative of anti-semitism. Since the Holocaust, anti-semitism has understandably been the most potent charge that can be levelled against anybody in politics. A deliberate and calculated campaign to apply the term to any criticism of Israel was ultimately successful in destroying Corbyn and his supporters as a short term threat.

So the demonisation of criticism of Israel was not an incidental ploy of the ruling class. It was the most important tool, by which they managed to kill off the most potent threat to their political hegemony to arise in a major western country for decades.

They succeeded because bluntly most people were not paying attention. Many ordinary people saw Israel as they had been taught to see Israel, as a victim nation and therefore criticism of it as generally reprehensible and plausibly anti-semitic. On top of which the defence of the idea of Israel allies with the Islamophobia which is closely correlated with the racism and anti-immigrant sentiment that remains a strong undercurrent in Western politics, and especially in England.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza has collapsed this narrative. Too many people have seen the truth on social media. Despite every attempt by the mainstream media to hide, obfuscate or distort, the truth is now out there. The reflex hurling by the Establishment of the “anti-semitic” slur at everybody who opposes the Genocide – from the United Nations, The International Court of Justice and the Pope down – has finally killed off the power of that slur.

A critical mass of ordinary people have even learnt of the history of the slow genocide of the Palestinians this last 75 years.

The political Establishment, having established support for Israel as the fundamental measure of political respectability which could neatly be used to exclude radicals from political discourse, have been unable to shift ground and drop it.

They are clinging to Israel, not because they have a genuine belief Israel is a force for good, not because they believe in religious Zionism, not even because they believe it is a necessary colonialist project in the Middle East, but because it has been for decades their totem, the very badge of political respectability, the membership card for the political country club.

Israel is now toxic to the public and the entire history of ethnic cleansing, massacre and long genocide on which the very existence of Israel is based, is now laid bare. The political class are now in a panic, and lashing out everywhere. Police powers to limit free assembly were already hugely increased just last year by the Public Order Act 2023, where any demonstration which is noisy or causes inconvenience can be banned. Now we have calls from the responsible ministers for pro-Palestinian demonstrations to be banned because they offend their sensibilities in a way they are finding difficult to define.

The proscribed organisation model is being considered now to limit freedom of speech and assembly. They are looking at banning the Muslim Council of Britain and Palestine Action. But you cannot ban an idea, and defining anyone who disagrees with you as an “extremist” is unlikely to stand up in the courts. Indeed anyone currently not being branded as an extremist ought to be deeply ashamed.

So far as I can see, only active supporters of genocide are not in the official view “extremists”. As all the main UK-wide political parties do support genocide, that of course makes sense.

It is worth noting that all the big attacks on liberty this last couple of years – including The Public Order Act, The National Security Act, and (in process) the Rwanda Safety Bill – have the support of Keir Starmer. I fully expect that whatever form the government move to make opposing genocide illegal finally takes, Keir Starmer will approve that too. Remember Starmer claimed that it is legal for Israel to starve Gaza.

Our hearts and minds remain with the people of Gaza. Their suffering and their heroism not only shines in itself, but it has cast a much needed light on the complete failure of the model of western democracy.

 

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Healthcare

I have a post on the political class’s frenetic attempts to criminalise dissent nearly finished, which I hope will be up tonight.

But as a lifelong supporter of the NHS, I wanted to share with you this.

I went to a village community health centre in Greece, feeling pretty rotten. I had to wait outside for the results of a covid test. Once cleared I was in and saw the doctor immediately, the Greek equivalent of a GP. He did the routine checks then took an ECG, and then took an X ray – none of this with an appointment and with no need to go off to a hospital. After an hour I was out again, with a prescription for four different drugs including antibiotics, a diagnosis of bronchitis and sinusitis, and firm orders to go to bed (which I did).

In the NHS I would have had to plead for a receptionist at all for an appointment to see a GP, and would have had to go to a hospital for the X-Ray and ECG. Then they would have probably decided to wait a week before giving antibiotics.

The Greek system was simply massively, massively a faster, more efficient and better experience. It was entirely free, except for 38 euros for the four prescriptions.

That’s it.

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Assange Final Appeal Day 2 – Your Man in the Public Gallery

I approached Day 2 with trepidation. It was not so much being accustomed to having hopes dashed, as having lived so long without hope that it was hard to know what to do with it. At 5.30am I stopped work for a while on writing up Day 1 and went out to walk down the Strand to the court. There was a slightly bigger crowd than had been there the day before at the same time, and happily it included the heroic volunteers saving my place,

A freezing Easterly wind was bustling down the Strand having come express from Siberia, driving before it what felt like a fair chunk of the North Sea, penetrating through layers of clothing with the ease of a ghost through the walls of St Pauls. I gave the volunteers my opinion of the case so far and what I hoped was a rousing 6am pep talk. They were just astonishingly cheerful in the circumstances. There is a human goodness which can warm from within – I do wish I had some.

Having explained I wanted to publish as much as I could before returning to court, I went back to my airbnb, where I needed to change all my clothing and even my shoes. I then got back to writing, and dashed off a good few more paragraphs before court then pressed publish.

I was a little worried that this might be the day I was arrested – my appearance the first day might have thrown the authorities off guard, and I had always thought they would likely think about it a little before acting on the “terrorism investigation” nonsense. But in the event I had no problems at all, and police and court officials continued to be very friendly towards me.

Taking our position in the courtroom, there were still less seats available to the public. This is because there was a much larger presence of the “court media”, meaning those London based journalists with permanent accreditation to the court. They had largely ignored Day 1 as that was Julian’s case; they had however turned up to report the US Government case on Day 2.

I had witnessed precisely the same behaviour at the ICJ Genocide Case in the Hague, where the Israeli arguments on the second day got massively more media coverage than South Africa on the first. The BBC even livestreamed the Israeli case but not the South African, which is a breathtaking level of bias.

So there were less spaces available. I was squashed up against the lady instructing the lawyer for the Home Secretay, who was actually extremely nice and kept feeding me mint humbugs as it became increasingly obvious I was struggling against cold symptoms.

James Lewis KC, who had previously led for the US government, was not present. This was unexplained; it is not usual to change the lead KC mid-way through an important case, and judges will generally bend over backwards to avoid diary clashes for them. I have to confess I had rather warmed to Lewis, as I think my reporting showed. I wondered if he had lost faith in his client; it may be of interest that his professional profile lists his most famous cases – but not this most famous case of all.

So his number 2, Clare Dobbin, today stepped up to the lead. She appeared to be on tenterhooks. For a full fifteen minutes before the appointed starting time at 10.30 am, she stood ready to go, her papers carefully spread out around the rostrum. She continually looked up at the judges’ chair as though mentally rehearsing zinging her arguments in that direction. Or imagining becoming a judge, how do I know what she was thinking? Ignore me.

It particularly seemed futile that she was standing there all ready to go while we were sitting around her heedlessly chatting, given that we would all have to stand up too when the judges came in, before resuming our places with a fuss of coughing, turning off phones, knocking over files, squashing sandwiches etc. Anyway there she stood, staring earnestly at the bench. This gave me time to remark that she had notably longer hair than the last time she appeared in this case, and the long blond fibres fell completely straight and evenly spaced, ending in a line of hair across the back of her legal gown that was not only perfectly straight but also perfectly horizontal, and remained so no matter how she moved.

It was the most disciplined hair I ever witnessed. I suspect she had shouted it into submission. Ms Dobbin has an extremely strong accent. It is right out of those giant Belfast shipyards that only ever employed Protestants and which produced great liners that sank more efficienctly, and in a more Hollywood friendly manner, than any other ships in the world.

Someone in the shipyard had taken Ms Dobbins’ accent and riveted on a few elongated vowel sounds in an effort to make it posher, but sadly this had caused cracks of comprehension below the waterline.

However something had happened to Ms Dobbin. She had been stentorian – I had previously described her as Ian Paisley in a wig. But now it took me several minutes to realise she had started speaking. This did not get better. The kindly Judge Dame Victoria Sharp came up with about eight different formulations in the course of the morning to ask her to speak up, like a school teacher encouraging a shy child at a carol concert. All to no avail.

One thing was very plain. Ms Dobbin had lost her faith in the case she was presenting. She hardly tried to argue it. That was not only in terms of volume. Ms Dobbin made very little effort at all to refute the arguments put by the Assange team the day before. Instead she merely read out large chunks of the affidavit provided by US Deputy Attorney General Kronberg in support of the second superceding indictment.

As judges Johnson and Sharp presumably can read, it was not plain what value this exercise added. Ms Dobbin is not so much in danger of being replaced by Artificial Intelligence, as being replaced by a Speak Your Weight machine. Which at least may have a more pleasant accent.

I should explain “Second superceding indictment”. The indictment, or raft of charges on which Julian Assange was first held for extradition, was an obvious load of nonsense flung together and scribbled on the back of Mike Pompeo’s laundry list. However before the hearings started the US Government was allowed to scrap this and replace it with an entirely different set of charges, the “FIrst Superceding Indictment”.

The rendition hearings started with five days of opening argument at Woolwich Crown Court, in the course of which the First Superceding Indictment was torn to shreds by the defence. Therefore – and please read this three times to overcome the disbelief you are about to feel – after the hearings had started and gone through the important opening argument phase, the United States Government was allowed to drop those charges, change them completely and present the Second Superceding Indictment with an entirely new bunch of charges based on Espionage and Hacking.

The Defence did not get to change their opening arguments to reflect the new charges, nor did they get the break of several months they requested to study the new charges and respond to them. Nor were they allowed to change their defence witness list, which consisted of witnesses called to rebut the charges now dropped, not the entirely different charges now faced.

Yes, you did read that all right. No, I can’t really believe it either. Now, let us continue. This is my very best effort to reconstruct, with occasional help from the kind lady from the Home Office, what Dobbin may have mumbled.

Dobbin opened by saying that the defence had made much of evidence being unchallenged. This was a mischaracterisation. All of the defence evidence was challenged.  None should be taken as accepted.

Judge Baraitser, said Dobbin, had shown very considerable leniency in allowing evidence to be heard of dubious relevance. Furthermore there was a nexus of relatioinships between several of the witnesses, and between some of the witnesses and Julian Assange. Some, including one lawyer, had been previously in his employee. The status and expertise of the witnesses individually and collectively is challenged. Their evidence was directly contradicted by the prior evidence which is contained in the witness affidavits of US Deputy Attorney Generals Dwyer and Kronberg.

This case is not about journalism. It is about the bulk disclosure of classified materials. It is about the indiscriminate publication of unredacted names. That is what distinguishes Wikileaks from the Guardian or New York Times. Judge Baraitser had rightly rejected outright that Assange is a journalist or akin to a journalist.

This is not a political prosecution. The US Administration had changed during these proceedings, but the prosecution continues because it is based upon law and evidence, not upon political motivation.

In Superceding Indictment 2 (which sounds like a very bad franchise movie) the hacking charge is added but the accusations in Superceding Indictment 1 are incorporated. What is alleged bears no relation to the Article X ECHR Freedom of Speech cases submitted by the defence. This case is about stolen and hacked documents, about a password hash hacked to allow Wikileaks and Manning to steal from the United States of America, and about the subsequent publication of unredacted names that had placed individuals at immediate risk of physical harm and arbitrary detention.

The indiscriminately published document files were massive. They included over 90,000 on Afghanistan, over 400,000 on Iraq and over 250,000 diplomatic cables. Assange had encouraged and caused Chelsea Manning to download the documents. The Wikileaks website actively solicits hacked material. “The suggestion Miss Manning is a whistleblower is unrealistic. A whistleblower reveals material legally obtained in the course of employment”. Manning however had illegally obtained material.

Assange cracking the password hash “goes far beyond the position of a journalist”. Judge Baraitser was therefore fully entitled to give full weight to that aspect of the case.

The United States had been obliged to go to great lengths to mitigate the danger that arose to its sources after their names were revealed, Many had been resettled, forced to move. The allegation is that the defendant knowingly and deliberately published the names of the informants.

As pointed out by Deputy Attorney General Kronberg, the charges had been approved by a Federal Grand Jury, after very careful independent consideration of the evidence.

Although this prosecution may indeed be unprecedented, it proceeded along long established principles. There is no immunity of journalists to violate the criminal law. There is now a specific law against the intentional release of the names of intelligence officers and sources, and it has been ruled that this does not breach the First Amendment. The only material for which Assange is being prosecuted under the Espionage Act is that containing names. That is the difference between this and earlier instances which were or were not prosecuted.

Kronberg stated in his affidavit that there is evidence of people having to leave their homes or even their countries as a result of this disclosure. Several had been arrested or interrogated, and some had disappeared.

The material released by Wikileaks had been useful to hostile governments, to terrorist groups and to criminal organisations. Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban had requested and studied some of the disclosed material.

The judges at this stage were looking much more comfortable than they had the day before. They sat back in their chairs visibly relaxed and smiling. Yesterday they had been discomfited by members of their own class saying things about US war crimes to their faces, which they preferred not to hear. Today they were getting a simple recital of Daily Mail cliches and trigger words that reinforce the Establishment world view. They were back in their milieu, like plump tropical fish in a tank whose heater had failed yesterday but just been replaced.

Dobbin continued that there was no question of any balance of public interest exercise being required. “The material that Assange published unredacted carries no public interest whatsoever. That is at the heart of the case.”

Judge Johnson asked whether Dobbin accepted the evidence given yesterday that others had published the unredacted material first. Dobbin replied that it was Assange who bore the responsibility for the material being available in the first place.

On the question of political extradition, the 2003 Act had transformed extradition law and had deliberately removed the prohibition on extradition for political offences which had been contained in Section 6 of the 1989 Extraidtion Act (shown here).

By contrast, Section 81 of the 2003 Extradition Act said this:

The phrase “political offence” had obviously been deliberately removed by parliament, said Dobbin.

Judge Johnson asked if there was any material published by government or anything said by ministers in Hansard which explained the omission. Dobbin replied that this was not needed, the excision was clear on the face of Section 81. If a Treaty contains a provision not incorporated in UK Domestic Law, it is not for the court to reinstate it. The political offence exclusion on extradition is not customary international law.

An unincorporated treaty can give rise to an obligation in domestic law, but cannot contradict the terms of a statute. Article 4 of the US/UK Extradition Treaty of 2007 contradicts the terms of Section 81(a) of the Extradition Act of 2003. That Article of the Treaty therefore falls in the United Kingdom, even though enforced in the United States where it does not contradict domestic legislation. Whereas extradition treaties are supposed to be mutual and interpreted the same way by both sides, that does not preclude an extradition by one party in unilateral circumstances.

At this point Judge Johnson was looking at Ms Dobbin with some conern, like a home supporter at a soccer match which his team is unexpectedly losing 3-0, who cannot quite work out why they are performing this badly.

At this point I thought I might introduce a panel so the reader can isolate this vital argument. The question is this. Is this provision of the 2003 Extradition Act at Section 81 (A):

Incompatible with this section of the subsequent US/UK Extradition Treaty of 2007:

so as to render the latter null and void? That is a fundamental question in this hearing and the assertion made by Dobbin.

If Judge Baraitser’s acceptance of this argument was correct, it of course means that the Home Office lawyers in 2007 drafted a treaty, approved by the FCO lawyers, which neither set of lawyers noticed was incompatible with the legislation the same lawyers had drafted just four years earlier.

It would also mean that the very substantive mechanisms for ensuring the compatibility of treaties with domestic legislation, involving a great round of formal written interdepartmental consultation, all failed too. I have personally worked those mechanisms when in the FCO, and I don’t see how they can fail.

Crucially, Dobbin’s argument depends on the notion that the Extradition Treaty gives a broader definition of what can be a politically motivated extradition, than the Act. So while Assange’s extradition would be barred by the Treaty, it is not by the Act.

But that is obviously nonsense. The entire purpose of the much longer provision in the Treaty is plainly to limit what counts as political under the very broad definition in the Act. It reduces the ground for denying extradition as political, it does not extend it. The fact that even this lengthy list of exclusions does not exclude Wikileaks’ activity is extremely telling.

Ok that’s the end of the panel. Let us return to the hearing.

Dobbin continued that Abuse of Process arguments do not enable the incorporation of unincorporated international treaties. As an example, alleged obligations of the UK under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child have been found by the courts not to be enforceable in domestic law. It is not accepted by the United States that this is a political offence. But even if it were, Swift and Baraitser are correct in law that there is no bar on extradition for political offence.

The defence had claimed the prosecution purported to be for a criminal offence but in reality was political. This argument must be treated with great caution, because any criminal could argue their offence was politically motivated.

The starting position must be the assumption of good faith on the part of the state with which the UK has treaty relations on extradition. The United States is one of the UK’s longest standing and closest international partners.

The Yahoo article was not fresh evidence. It had been properly considered and rejected by Swift and Baraitser. It was internally inconsistent and included official denials of the conduct alleged. The court must consider the nexus between those making allegations of impropriety and the appellant. Ecuador had rescinded his claim of political sylum and Assange was properly arrested by police invited in to the Ecuadorean Embassy. There is simply no evidence that any harm would come to Assange were he to be extradited.

Even accepting the Yahoo article as evidence, that does not affect the objective basis of extradition proceedings. It states that kidnapping was rejected by US government lawyers as it would interfere with criminal proceedings.

It is not journalism to encourage people to break the Official Secrets Act or to steal information. Miss Manning is not a whistleblower but a hacker. Protected speech is therefore not engaged and that entire line of argument falls. Baraitser rightly distinguishes between Wikileaks and the concept of “responsible journalism”. No public interest could attach to the indiscriminate mass release of information.

There are many reasons why the title of whistleblower does not attach to Chelsea Manning. There is no evidence Manning had any specific information she wished to impart or any specific issues she wished to pursue.

Julian Assange did not have to disclose the unredacted material. It was not a necessary part of his publication. The New York Times had published some of the material responsibly and redacted. Assange by contrast arrogated to himself the role of deciding what was in the public interest.

The defence was mistaken in its approach to Article X on Freedom of Speech. The approach in England and Wales is not to consider whether a particular publication is compatible with Article X, but whether a particular criminal charge is compatible with Article X. Plainly the charge was compatible in this case with Article X restrictions on grounds of national security. There was no error in law. In this jurisdiction Assange could also be charged with conspiracy.

Johnson then asked a very careful question. If, in this country, a journalist had information on serious governmental wrongdoing and solicited classified material, and published that material in a serious and careful way, would that not engage Article X?

Dobbin replied that following the decision in the Shayler case, he should have pursued internal avenues.

Johnson pressed that he was not talking of the whistleblower but of the journalist. Would the journalist have Article X protection?

Dobbin replied no, but there would have to be a proportionality test before a prosecution was engaged. (You will recall Dobbin had stated earlier that in this case there was no need for any such balancing test as Manning was not a whistleblower and the material was not in the public interest).

Dobbin said the USA was at pains to distinguish this unprecedented prosecution from ordinary journalism. This was indiscriminate publication of material. The Rosen case was important because, although in a lower court, it explains why you prosecute Wikileaks and not the New York Times. (This case has come up repeatedly throughout the hearings. Of current interest, it was about AIPAC receiving and using classified information).

While it was the case that the United States could argue that Julian Assange was not entitled to First Amendment protection due to his nationality, it was not saying it would do that. This was merely noted as an option. This could not therefore be a block to extradition due to discrimination on grounds of nationality under Section 81a.

Johnson interjected that in the affidavit we have the prosecutor clearly saying that he might do this. Dobbin replied that this was “tenuous”. Even if the prosecutor did it, there was no way of telling how it might work out. The judge might reject it.  This argument could fall flat in court. This possibility did not offer sufficient foundation to exclude extradition on the basis of discrimination due to nationality. Further this would be about Convention rights that lie outwith the jurisdiction of this court.

At this point Judge Dame Victoria Sharp was looking at Dobbin with great concern, as Dobbin prattled on with a kind of stream of consciousness of meaningless phrases. Judge Johnson attempted to bring her back to reality. Do we have any evidence, he asked, that a foreign national does indeed have the same First Amendment rights as a US citizen?

Well, yes, replied Dobbin. Or perhaps, no. One of the two. She would find out.

With that, Dobbin sat down with a look of great relief. She had got to the end, and spoken so softly that not many people heard what she had said. SO not too much damage done. The judges looked even more relieved that she had finished. Prof Alice Edwards, the redoubtable UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, was in court. I wanted to ask her whether listening to Dobbin for more than 15 minutes could in itself be construed as cruel and unusual punishment, but sadly she was seated too far away.

The next KC for the USA now stood up, a Mr Smith, who had been promoted from Number 3 to Number 2 in the absence of Lewis. Smith from his manner had no doubts at all about his client’s case, or at least he had no doubts about his fee, which amounts to the same thing. He also had no problem being heard. They heard him in Chelsea.

He said that he wished to address the mosaic of complaints brought by the applicant unders Articles IV and VI of the ECHR, relating to fair trial, the rule of law and abuse of process. In the written submissions, the appellant had referred to the system of plea bargaining as enforcing guilty pleas by threatening disproportionate punishment, thus interfering with fair trial. But this argument had never been accepted in any extradition to the United States. In some matters, such as jury selection, the defendant had better rights than in the UK.

With regard to the system of sentencing enhancement with reference to other alleged offences not charged, this could not be abuse of process or denial of fair trial. It was “specialty or nothing”, specialty being the principle in international law that a person extradited could only be charged with the named offence.

As the appellant had noted, the US trial judge could enhance the sentence on the basis of whether the applicant was guilty of further offences, on a “balance of probability” judgment. But this does not mean the defendant is convicted of those further offences. The conviction is solely for the offence charged, enhanced by other conduct. The specialty argument then falls. This was not dissimilar to the UK, where aggravating or mitigating factors might be taken into account.

This could come nownere near the threshold of a “flagrant” breach of the rule of law required to bring the ECHR into operation. Article 6 (2) would only be invoked if the procedure involved an additional conviction on a new charge. The appellant had also raised the possibility of sentencing enhancement from the information in classified material that would be shown to the judge but not to the defendant or his lawyers. But there was no evidence before the court that showed this would happen in this case.

We now come, said Smith, to the question of grossly disproportionate sentencing, which the defence first raised in relation to Article III of ECHR and they now relate also to Article X on Freedom of Speech. But it is not the norm to impose UK sentencing standards on foreign states. The test is whether a sentencing decision is “extreme”.

The defence had given the estimate of 175 years, as the maximum sentence for each charge, running consecutively. But the defence’s own expert witnesses had given different estimates, ranging from 30 to 40 years to 70 to 80 months.

In his affidavit the Deputy Attorney General had stated that avoiding disparity was a key factor in sentencing guidelines. Miss Manning had been sentenced to 35 years and eligible for parole after one third of that sentence under military law. Kronberg had given other possible comparators ranging from 42 months to 63 months.

Assange stood accused of very serious conduct, for which sentence could be upped by significant aggravating factors. In the UK, Simon Finch had his sentence increased to 8 years for leaking a document which had put national security at risk. By comparison Assange’s alleged offence was not just grave but entirely unprecedented.

Assange and others at Wikileaks had recruited Chelsea Manning and other hackers, encouraged them to steal classified information, had published unredacted names thus putting lives in danger and causing relocation. So none of the range of sentences which had been placed before the court would be grossly disproportionate, from 60 months to 40 years.

Article X could only be applied in these circumstances to a flagrant breach of Freedom of Speech rights. That was not the case. This was neither a whistleblower case nor responsible journalism. It does not engage Article X at all.

Judge Johnson asked for a copy of the sentencing remarks of the court martial in the Manning case.

Ben Watson KC now stood up to address the court on behalf of the UK Home Secretary, although on recent form he could not be sure if that would still be the same person when he got back to the office. He stated that the Secretary of State has no role in supervising the extradition treaty, The substantive decision is for the judges.

He said that it was worth noting that the bar on political extradition had been removed from the European Framework Agreement between EU member states. It was a doctrine “on the wane”.

There was no basis for the court to infer that Parliament was not aware of the difference between section 81 of the 2003 Extradition Act and the bar on political extradition at section 6 of the 1989 Act. See for example the contribution of Prof Ross Cranston MP in the debate on the act (Cranston was both an MP and a former High Court judge).

I suspect that Watson threw this out with confidence that nobody actually would see the contribution of Prof Ross Cranston MP in the debate. But then Mr Watson has never met me. I did decide to see the contribution of Prof Ross Cranston MP in the debate, and this is what he had to say on the subject of political extradition, in the debate on 9 December 2002.

Clause 13 refers to extraneous circumstances. We shall not extradite people where they might be pursued for political or religious opinions. That is a good thing. There is, of course, the question of definition. In the Shayler case, the French court refused to extradite Shayler to this country on the ground that it was a political offence, so there can be disagreement about what extraneous circumstances might entail. However, there is a valuable barrier that will operate in our domestic law.

That rather conveys the opposite sense to what Watson claimed Professor Cranston was saying. Cranston says political offences will still be banned, and it will be for the courts to define them. That is plainly not the same as saying the Act is removing the bar on extradition for political offences.

Judge Johnson now asked Watson a question. The treaty bars extradition for a political offence. So does this mean that if the US receives a request for extradition for a political offence from the UK, it can refuse it. But if the UK receives an extradition request for an identical political offence from the US, it cannot refuse it, and the Secretary of State cannot block it even if they consider it contrary to Article IV?

Watson replied yes, that is the position. He seemed to find nothing troubling in that at all. Judge Johnosn however seemed to find it a strange proposition.

Watson moved on to the death penalty. Chelsea Manning had not received the death penalty. There was nothing to suggest the applicant faced the serious threat of the death penalty. The fact that the United States had said that Assange could serve his sentence in Australia could be taken as an assurance against the death penalty. So there was no need for the Secretary of State to seek assurances. The United States had suggested Assange faced a maximum penalty of 30 to 40 years.

Judge Johnson then intervened again, and asked if there were anything to prevent the United States from adding offences of aiding and abetting treason or other counts of espionage which do attract the death penalty? Watson replied there was nothing to stop them, but that would be contrary to the assurance received on serving sentence in Australia. There must be a threshold of possibility of the death penalty before the Secretary of State was obliged to seek assurances against it.

Edward Fitzgerald then rose for rebuttal. He was in much more commandanding form today, on the attack, scornful of the arguments he was dismissing with a broad sweep of rhetoric.

Edward Fitzgerald KC

The United States had failed to address the point of arbitrariness. Of course it was arbitrary to lock somebody up under an extradition treaty, while deliberately ignoring a major provision of that very treaty that specifically says they should not be locked up. Even if we did ignore this vital provision in the treaty, Assange was still being being punished for his political opinions contrary to Section 81 of the Extradition Act.

It had been suggested that the removal of the phrase “political offence” from the 2003 Act was an “express omission”. But there was no evidence produced of that. “You are saying that silence provides by inference the provision of the Act, that disapplies a provision that plainly is actually in the subsequent Treaty”.

It is ludicrous to say the bar on political extradition is out of date. It is not out of date. The UK continues to sign extradition treaties containing this exact same provision. It is in all but 2 of the UK’s over 150 extradition treaties. It is in all US extradition treaties. It is in many major international instruments. Plainly this is abuse of process. As stated plainly by Bingham and Harper “it is abuse to disentitle someone to the protection of the treaty”.

The United States had come nowhere near to meeting the point on the discrimination by nationality, if Mr Assange were not given First Amendment protection because he is not a US citizen. For the US prosecutor to say we may or may not apply this discrimination was no answer, any more than if they said they reserved the right to torture somebody but may not do it.

On enhanced sentencing, this point also had not been met. There was a clear danger Assange would be sentenced for offences with which he was not charged.

Judge Sharp asked Fitzgerald if this point could not block every extradition to the USA. Fitzgerald said no, it should be judged on a case by case basis on the likelihood of this occurring. In this case the court had evidence that the prosecution had not been motivated by the offences charged, but by other alleged conduct. Judge Sharp asked if he meant the  CIA Vault 7 leaks. Fitzgerald confirmed that he did.

Mark Summers KC then stood to continue the rebuttal. It was remarkable, he declared in a tone of barely suppressed range, that counsel for the USA had spoken for hours and never once acknowledged the massive evidence of criminal state level behaviour by the United States revealed in the leaked material. They never mentioned or acknowledged the war crimes revealed. There had never been any challenge in the court to the witnesses who testified for days that the material exposed state level crimes.

Mark Summers KC

Summers said that a key United States argument seemed to turn on the notion that what constitued a political act and political persecution under section 81, and the standards of evidence required in judging them, were different in an extradition hearing than applied in consideration of political asylum cases. This was wrong, They were the same. The protected categories in Article 33 of the Refugee Convention of 1954

on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.

Were in practice identical to the protected categories of the 2003 Extradition Act Section 81:

on account of his race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation or political opinions

There was a reason for this. The protection to be given under the Extradition Act and under the Refugee Convention is identical, and for identical reasons, and to be judged by the same standards.

When you prosecute for the act of publishing evidence of war crimes, the nexus that made this political persecution was entirely plain. Publication of information which exposes a state’s crims is protected speech. The state you exposed cannot prosecute you for that.

We had heard much about Deputy Attorney General Kronberg, but he was not the initiator. This was all ordered from way above his head. The prosecution had been decided at the very top. You cannot discuss the sheep and ignore the shepherd. The prosecution had noted that Trump had praised Wikileaks a couple of times as though that ruled out the possibility that agencies in the United States were plotting to kill Assange. That plainly did not follow.

We had clear evidence both from the Yahoo News article and from Protected Witness 2 that their were plans laid by US authorities to murder, kidnap or poison Assange. What does that tell us about the intentions of the US government, as opposed to the bland claims of Mr Kronberg?

The point of foreseeability had not been countered. There was no effort made to counter it. In 2010 it could not have been foreseen that publication would bring espionage charges against the publisher. It had never happened before. Encouraging a whistleblower to produce documents was definitely not unprecedented. That was an absurd claim. It was everyday journalistic activity, as witnesses had testified. No witnesses had been produced to say the opposite.

Of course it was illegal for journalists to commit criminal acts to obtain material. That had not happened here. But even on that case, it does not render the act of publication illegal.

The release of unredacted names was by no means unprecedented. Daniel Ellsberg had testified in these very hearings that the Pentagon Papers he released contained hundreds of unredacted names of sources and officers. The Philip Agee case also released unredacted names of sources and officers. Neither had resulted in an Espionage Act prosecution, or any prosecution aimed at a journalist or publisher.

The information released revealed war crimes. Article X is therefore unavoidably engaged by protected speech. The Shayler case was being misapplied by the prosecution. That judgment specifically excluded the press from liability for publication. It was about the position of the whistleblower. Assange is not the whistleblower here, Manning is. Assange is the publisher. There is no suggestion whatsoever, in any of the Strasbourg authorities, that the press are to be regarded the same way as the whistleblower. What Strasbourg does dictate is that there must be an Article X balancing exercise with the public interest in the disclosures. No such exercise was undertaken by Baraitser.

The prosecution refused to acknowledge the fact, backed up by extensive and unchallenged witness evidence, that Assange had undertaken a whole year of a major redaction exercise to avoid publication of names which might be put at risk. This year was followed by one of the media partners publishing the password to the unredacted material as the chapter heading in a book. Then Mr Assange made desperate efforts to mitigate the damage, including by phoning the White House. This did not accord at all with the prosecution narrative: “At best, Mr Assange was reckless in providing the key to Mr Leigh”.

Several others had then published the full, unredacted database first, including Cryptome. None had been prosecuted, yet more evidence that this prosecution was unforeseeable.

There was however no evidence given of harm to any individual from the disclosures. What had been created was a risk. You had to set against that risk the proposed sentence of 30 to 40 years in jail suggested by the prosecution. The guidelines say rest of life. Chelsea Manning was given 35 years. Evidence had been given that 30 years was a “floor not a ceiling”. A sentence like this for publication “shocks the conscience of every journalist around the world”.

For what? For revealing state level crime including torture, rendition, waterboarding, drone strikes, murder, assassination, strappado. Strasbourg regards revelation of these state level crimes as extremely important. The court has ruled revelations of such abuses as clearly covered by Article X. Leaks had the capacity to stop such abuses, and in some cases actually had. The exposure of major international criminal wrongdoing outweighs the risk created by revealing the names of some of those involved in it.

Dame Victoria interjected that some of the names were of people not involved in criminal wrongdoing. Summers accepted this but said “it is just not tenable to argue, as the prosecution does, that there is no public interest whatsoever in the publications”.

Turning to the issue of capital punishment, the Home Office contended that there was “no real risk”. But it was admitted that Assange could be charged with a capital offence. This exercise is not a risk assessment. The law says that in circumstances where the death penalty might be imposed, there must be an assurance sought against it. “We don’t understand why there is no routine assurance against the death penalty provided in this case. If there is no risk, then surely there is no difficulty in providing the assurance”.

Then, all of a sudden, the hearing was over. The judges stood and left through the door behind them. Five minutes later they were back and reserved their judgment, asking for various written materials to be provided, with a last deadline of March 4. Then they left and it was over.

I am conscious that this account flows less well and reads much more bittily than the account of day one. That is simply how it was. One the first day Assange’s legal team set out a planned and detailed exposition of the case. On the second the USA and Home Office responded, and did so in rather disjointed fashion, essentially just reiterating the accusations. There was little legal argument as to why Baraitser and Swift had been right to accept them. The rebuttal was thereafter a series of quickfire returns on individual points.

It was impossible not to note that the judges were distinctly unimpressed by some elements of the prosecution. The possibility of discrimination by nationality over applying the First Amendment appears to be an argument to which the judges were searching in vain for an adequate answer. They were also plainly dissatisfied with the lack of an assurance on the death penalty.

But the British security state is never going to accept that the publication of state secrets is justified where it reveals state crimes, and the judges were desperate to hang on the the ruse of avoiding that question by saying this is only about the publication of names of innocent sources. They are also never going to entertain the wider criticisms of the US system such as sentence enhancement.

So my prediction is that a further appeal will be allowed, but only on the narrow grounds of discrimination by nationality and the death penalty. If their hand is thus forced, the Americans will produce an assurance against the latter and the appeal will be on discriminiation by nationality.

That appeal will be scheduled for the Autumn, and its result dragged out until after the US election to avoid embarassment to Biden. That is my best guess of what happens next. Of course all the time the Establishment has achieved its objective by keeping Julian in a maximum security jail for longer.

The point in the whole proceedings which struck me most strongly, was that in the initial hearings the US was keen to downplay the possible sentence, continually emphasising 6 to 7 years as likely. Now an earlier decision has removed considerations of US prison conditions and Julian’s health from the case, they have radically changed tack and were emphasising repeatedly 30 to 40 years as the norm, which is in effect a rest of life sentence. That shift, together with the refusal so far to rule out the death penalty, gives a measure of the ruthlessness with which the CIA is pursuing this case.

My apologies for the delay in producing this report. I caught quite a serious chest infection, I think from the cold and wet in London those days, and was really very ill.

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The post Assange Final Appeal Day 2 – Your Man in the Public Gallery appeared first on Craig Murray.

Assange Final Appeal – Your Man in the Public Gallery

Reporting on Julian Assange’s extradition hearings has become a vocation that has now stretched over five years. From the very first hearing, when Justice Snow called Assange “a narcissist” before Julian had said anything whatsoever other than to confirm his name, to the last, when Judge Swift had simply in 2.5 pages of glib double-spaced A4 dismissed a tightly worded 152-page appeal from some of the best lawyers on earth, it has been a travesty and charade marked by undisguised institutional hostility.

We were now on last orders in the last chance saloon, as we waited outside the Royal Courts of Justice for the appeal for a right of final appeal.

The architecture of the Royal Courts of Justice was the great last gasp of the Gothic revival; having exhausted the exuberance that gave us the beauty of St Pancras Station and the Palace of Westminster, the movement played out its dreary last efforts at whimsy in shades of gray and brown, valuing scale over proportion and mistaking massive for medieval. As intended, the buildings are a manifestation of the power of the state; as not intended, they are also an indication of the stupidity of large scale power.

Court number 5 had been allocated for this hearing. It is one of the smallest courts in the building. Its largest dimension is its height. It is very high, and lit by heavy mock medieval chandeliers hung by long cast iron chains from a ceiling so high you can’t really see it. You expect Robin Hood to suddenly leap from the gallery and swing across on the chandelier above you. The room is very gloomy; the murky dusk hovers menacingly above the lights like a miasma of despair, below them you peer through the weak light to make out the participants.

A huge tiered walnut dais occupies half the room, with the judges seated at its apex, their clerks at the next level down, and lower lateral wings reaching out, at one side housing journalists and at the other a huge dock for the prisoner or prisoners, with a massy iron cage that looks left over from a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

This is in fact the most modern part of the construction; caging defendants in medieval style is in fact a Blair era introduction to the so-called process of law.

Rather incongruously, the clerks’ tier was replete with computer hardware, with one of the two clerks operating behind three different computer monitors and various bulky desktop computers, with heavy cables twisting in all directions like sea kraits making love. The computer system seems to bring the court into the 1980’s, and the clerk behind it looked uncannily like a member of a synthesiser group of that era, right down to the upwards pointing haircut.

In period keeping, this computer feed to an overflow room did not really work, which led to a number of halts in proceedings.

All the walls are lined with high bookcases housing thousands of leather bound volumes of old cases. The stone floor peeks out for one yard between the judicial dais and the storied wooden pews, with six tiers of increasingly narrow seating. The barristers occupied the first tier and their instructing solicitors the second, with their respective clients on the third. Up to ten people per line could squeeze in, with no barriers on the bench between opposing parties, so the Assange family was squashed up against the CIA, State Department and UK Home Office representatives.

That left three tiers for media and public, about thirty people. There was however a wooden gallery above which housed perhaps twenty more. With little fuss and with genuine helpfulness and politeness, the court staff – who from the Clerk of Court down were magnificent – had sorted out the hundreds of those trying to get in, and we had the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, we had 16 Members of the European Parliament, we had MPs from several states, we had NGOs including Reporter Without Borders, we had the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, and we had, (checks notes) me, all inside the Court.

I should say this was achieved despite the extreme of official unhelpfulness from the Ministry of Justice, who had refused official admission and recognition to all of the above, including the United Nations. It was pulled together by the police, court staff and the magnificent Assange volunteers led by Jamie. I should also acknowledge Jim, who with others spared me the queue all night in the street I had undertaken at the International Court of Justice, by volunteering to do it for me.

This sketch captures the tiny non-judicial portion of the court brilliantly. Paranoid and irrational regulations prevent publications of photos or screenshots.

My rough sketch while trying to listen on a difficult audio feed.

At front two Counsels for #Assange, to right behind them Gareth Perice, then from right John Shipton, @GabrielShipton, @Stella_Assange, behind them @ChrisLynnHedges. Also saw @CraigMurrayOrg and @suigenerisjen. pic.twitter.com/pNI2mHMRHW

— Matt Ó Branáin (@MattOBranain) February 20, 2024

The acoustics of the court are simply terrible. We are all behind the barristers as they stood addressing the judges, and their voices were at the same time muffled yet echoing from the bare stone walls.

I did not enter with a great deal of hope. As I have explained in How the Establishment Functions, judges do not have to be told what decision is expected by the Establishment. They inhabit the same social milieu as ministers, belong to the same institutions, attend the same schools, go to the same functions. The United States’ appeal against the original blocking of Assange’s extradition was granted by a Lord Chief Justice who is the former room-mate, and still best friend, of the minister who organised the removal of Julian from the Ecuadorean Embassy.

The blocking of Assange’s appeal was done by Judge Swift, a judge who used to represent the security services, and said they were his favourite clients. In the subsequent Graham Phillips case, where Mr Phillips was suing the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) for sanctions being imposed upon him without any legal case made against him, Swift actually met FCDO officials – one of the parties to the case – and discussed matters relating to it privately with them before giving judgment. He did not tell the defence he had done this. They found out, and Swift was forced to recuse himself.

Personally I am surprised Swift is not in jail, let alone still a High Court judge. But then what do I know of justice?

The Establishment politico-legal nexus was on even more flagrant display today. Presiding was Dame Victoria Sharp, whose brother Richard had arranged an £800,000 loan for then Prime Minister Boris Johnson and immediately been appointed Chairman of the BBC, (the UK’s state propaganda organ). Assisting her was Justice Jeremy Johnson, another former barrister representing MI6.

By an amazing coincidence, Justice Johnson had been brought in seamlessly to replace his fellow ex-MI6 hiree Justice Swift and find for the FCDO in the Graham Phillips case!

And here these two were now to judge Julian!

What a lovely, cosy club is the Establishment! How ordered and predictable! We must bow down in awe at its majesty and near divine operation. Or go to jail.

Well, Julian is in jail, and we stood ready for his final shot for an appeal. We all stood up and Dame Victoria took her place. In the murky permanent twilight of the courtroom, her face was illuminated from below by the comparatively bright light of a computer monitor. It gave her a grey, spectral appearance, and the texture and colour of her hair merged into the judicial wig seamlessly. She seems to hover over us as a disturbingly ethereal presence.

Her colleague, Justice Johnson, for some reason was positioned as far to her right as physically possible. When they wished to confer he had to get up and walk. The lighting arrangements did not appear to cater for his presence at all, and at times he merged into the wall behind him.

Dame Victoria opened by stating that the court had given Julian permission to attend in person or to follow on video, but he was too unwell to do either. After that disturbing news, Edward Fitzgerald KC rose to open the case for the defence to be allowed an appeal.

There is a crumpled magnificence about Mr Fitzgerald. He speaks with great authority and a moral certainty that compels belief. At the same time he appears so large and well-meaning, so absent of vanity or pretence, that it is like watching Paddington Bear in a legal gown. He is a walking caricature of Edward Fitzgerald. Barrister’s wigs have tight rolls of horsehair stuck to a mesh that stretches over the head. In Mr Fitzgerald’s case, the mesh has to be stretched so far to cover his enormous brain, that the rolls are pulled apart, and dot his head like hair curlers on a landlady.

Fitzgerald opened with a brief headline summary of what the defence would argue, in identifying legal errors by Judge Swift and Magistrate Baraitser, that meant an appeal was viable and should be heard.

Firstly, extradition for a political offence was explicitly excluded under the UK/US Extradition Treaty which was the basis for the proposed extradition. The charge of espionage was a pure political offence, recognised as such by all legal authorities, and Wikileaks’ publications had been to a political end, and even resulted in political change, so were protected speech.

Baraitser and Swift were wrong to argue that the Extradition Treaty was not incorporated in UK domestic law and therefore “not justiciable”, because extradition against its terms engaged Article V of the European Convention on Human Rights on Abuse of Process and Article X on Freedom of Speech.

The Wikileaks revelations had revealed serious state illegality by the government of the United States, up to and including war crimes. It was therefore protected speech.

Article III and Article VII of the ECHR were also engaged because in 2010 Assange could not possibly have predicted a prosecution under the Espionage Act, as this had never been done before despite a long history in the USA of reporters publishing classified information in national security journalism. The “offence” was therefore unforeseeable. Assange was being “Prosecuted for engaging in the normal journalistic practice of obtaining and publishing classified information”.

The possible punishment in the United States was entirely disproportionate, with a total possible jail sentence of 175 years for those “offences” charged so far.

Assange faced discrimination on grounds of nationality, which would make extradition unlawful. US authorities had declared he would not be entitled to First Amendment protection in the United States because he is not a US citizen.

There was no guarantee further charges would not be brought more serious than those which had already been laid, in particular with regard to the Vault 7 publication of CIA secret technological spying techniques. In this regard, the United States had not provided assurances the death penalty could not be invoked.

The CIA had made plans to kidnap, drug and even to kill Mr Assange. This had been made plain by the testimony of Protected Witness 2 and confirmed by the extensive Yahoo News publication. Therefore Assange would be delivered to authorities who could not be trusted not to take extrajudicial action against him.

Finally, the Home Secretary had failed to take into account all these due factors in approving the extradition.

Fitzgerald then moved into the unfolding of each of these arguments, opening with the fact that the US/UK Extradition Treaty specifically excludes extradition for political offences, at Article IV.

Fitzgerald said that espionage was the “quintessential” political offence, acknowledged as such in every textbook and precedent. The court did have jurisdiction over this point because ignoring the provisions of the treaty rendered the court liable to accusations of abuse of process. He noticed that neither Swift nor Baraitser had made any judgment on whether or not the offences charged were political, relying on the argument the treaty did not apply anyway.

But the entire extradition depended on the treaty. It was made under the treaty. “You cannot rely on the treaty, and then refute it”.

This point brought the first overt reaction from the judges, as they looked at each other to wordlessly communicate what they had made of it. It was a point of which they had felt the force.

Fitzgerald continued that when the 2003 Extradition Act, on which the Treaty depended, had been presented to Parliament, ministers had assured parliament that people would not be extradited for political offences. Baraitser and Swift had said that the 2003 Act had deliberately not had a clause forbidding extradition for political offences. Fitzgerald said you could not draw that inference from an absence. There was nothing in the text permitting extradition for political offences. It was silent on the point.

Nothing in the Act precluded the court from determining that an extradition contrary to the terms of the treaty under which the extradition was taking place, would be a breach of process. In the United States, there had been cases where extradition to the UK under the treaty had been prevented by the courts because of the ‘no political extradition’ clause. That must apply at both ends.

Of the UK’s 158 extradition treaties, 156 contained a ban on extradition for political offences. This was plainly systematic and entrenched policy. It could not be meaningless in all these treaties. Furthermore this was the opposite of a novel argument. There were a great many authoritative cases, stretching back centuries, in the UK, US, Ireland, Canada, Australia and many other countries in which no political extradition was firmly established jurisprudence. It could not suddenly be “not justiciable”.

It was not only justiciable, it had been very extensively adjudicated.

All of the offences charged were as “espionage” except for one. That “hacking” charge, of helping Chelsea Manning in receiving classified documents, even if it were true, was plainly a similar allegation of a form of espionage activity.

The indictment describes Wikileaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence agency”. That was plainly an accusation of espionage. This is self-evidently a politically motivated prosecution for a political offence.

[To be continued. Have to rush back into court. Sorry no proof reading yet]

 

The post Assange Final Appeal – Your Man in the Public Gallery appeared first on Craig Murray.

Rethinking Ukraine: Putin and the Mystery of National Identity

The genocide in Gaza – or more precisely the major NATO powers’ active and practical support for the genocide in Gaza – has forced me to re-evaluate my views on Ukraine in a manner more sympathetic to the Russian narrative.

In particular, I was complacent in my dismissive attitude to the argument that the Western powers would back ethnic cleansing and massacre in the Donbass, by forces including some motivated by Nazi ideology. The same powers who are funding and arming Ukraine are funding and arming a genocide by racial supremacist Israeli forces in Gaza. It is beyond argument that my belief in some kind of inherent decency in the Western political Establishment was naive.

I apologise.

This does not mean that I was wrong to call the Russian invasion of the Ukrainian state illegal. I am afraid it was. You see, the law is the law. It has only a tenuous connection to either morality or justice. A thing can be justified and morally right, but still illegal.

The proof of this is that we have an entire legal structure governing transactions which is designed to achieve massive concentration of wealth. In consequence, the world is predicted to have its first trillionaires inside the next five years, while millions of children go hungry. That is plainly immoral. It is plainly unjust. But it is not only legal, it is the purpose of the system of law.

I am, however, content that the “Right to Protect” doctrine has not become accepted in international law, because it is in general application neo-imperialist. It was developed by the Blair government initially to justify NATO bombing of Serbia and the British re-occupation of Sierra Leone, and was used by Hillary Clinton to justify the destruction of Libya on the basis of lies about imminent massacre in Benghazi. We should be wary of the doctrine.

(That is the major theme of my book The Catholic Orangemen of Togo).

The causes of the Russian invasion of Ukraine are plain. Alarm at NATO expansionism and forward positioning of aggressive military assets encircling Russia. The Ukrainian coup of 2014. Exasperation at Ukrainian bad faith and the ignoring of the Minsk accords. The continuing death toll from shelling of Russian speakers in the Donbass.

The suppression of the Russian language, of Russian Orthodox religion and of the main pro-Russian opposition political party in Ukraine are simple facts. These I have always acknowledged: until I saw the positive enthusiasm of leaders of the Western states for massacre in Gaza, I was not convinced they could not have been addressed by diplomacy and negotiation. I now have to reassess that view in the light of new information, and I now think Putin was justified in the invasion.

It is not that any of the arguments are new. It is simply that before I did not believe that the West would sponsor mass ethnic cleansing and genocidal attack on the Donbass by extreme Ukrainian nationalist-led, Western-armed forces. I thought the “West” was more civilised than that. I now have to face the fact that I was wrong about the character of the NATO powers.

The alternative to Putin’s action probably was indeed massacre and ethnic cleansing.

The urgent need now is for negotiation to put an end to the war. On that my position has not changed. The war is a disaster for the people of Europe. The American destruction of Nord Stream has devastated the German economy and resulted in huge energy price increases for consumers all across Europe, including the UK. There was a step jump in food inflation which has not been pulled back.

The continuation of the war will of course prime the pump of the military industrial complex. Massive defence spending is the most efficient way to ensure kickbacks to the political class who control the flow of state funds, through both legal and illegal forms of corrupt reward to politicians.

As Julian Assange said, the object is not to win wars: the object is forever wars, to keep the funds flowing.

The truth is that the longer the war persists, the less generous Russia will be over returning occupied territory to Ukraine. The deal which was torpedoed by the West nearly two years ago (and in truth the US played more of a role than Boris Johnson – I was actually there in Turkey) ceded the Crimea only to Ukraine, with a Minsk plus deal for the Donbass which would have remained Ukrainian. That is unthinkable now. The major question is how large a coastal corridor Russia will insist on keeping westward from Crimea, and whether Putin can be persuaded to accept less than the historical dividing line of the Dnieper.

I do not share the Russian triumphalism at the dwindling manpower resources of the Ukraine. With the obscene billions the West is pumping in to remote warfare in Ukraine, that is not the factor you might expect. But the political will of the West to continue to pump in these billions is plainly sapping, as it becomes obvious there will be no successful Ukrainian offensive. Put simply, Russia will outlast its opponents.

It has always been the case that the sooner Ukraine and the West settle, the better deal they will get, and that is more true every day. But prolonging the war is an end in itself to those who make money from it.

Putin’s historical disquisition to Tucker Carlson opened some Western eyes to another national perspective, and gave rise to widespread claims by Western media that Putin was factually wrong. In fact almost all of his facts were correct. The interpretation of them, and the position of other facts which were omitted or given less weight, is of course the art of history.

There is no question I find more fascinating in history than the formation and dissolution of national identities.

My own perspective on this – and there is no subject on which it is more important to understand the vantage point of the person writing – is governed by two factors in particular. Firstly, I am a Scot and come from one of Europe’s oldest nation states, which then lost its independence and struggles to regain it after being submerged in a new “British” national identity.

Secondly, as a former diplomat I lived and worked in the political field in a number of countries with differing histories of national identity.

These include Poland, a nation state which the historian Norman Davies brilliantly quipped “Has emerged from time to time through the mists of history – but never in the same place twice”.

It includes Ghana, a state with an extremely strong sense of national identity but which was an entirely artificial colonial creation.

It includes Nigeria, another entirely artificial colonial creation but which has struggled enormously to build national identity against deep and often violent ethnic and cultural differences.

It includes Uzbekistan, a country which also has entirely artificial colonial borders but which the western “left” fail to recognise as an ex-colony because they refuse to acknowledge the Soviet Union was a continuation of the Russian Empire.

So I have seen all this, as someone with a training and interest as a historian, who has read a great deal of Eastern European history. I have also lived in Russia and was for a time both a fluent Russian and Polish speaker. I do not write this to claim I am right, but so that you know what has formed my view.

Putin argued at great length that there never was such a country as “Ukraine”. The BBC has run a “fact check” and claimed this is “Nonsense”.

There are several points to make about this. The first is that the BBC did not, as it claimed, go to “independent historians”. It went to Polish, Ukrainian and Armenian historians with their own very distinct agenda.

The second is that these historians did not actually take issue with Putin’s facts. For a fact-check it does not really examine any of Putin’s historical facts at all. What the historians did was put forward other facts they felt deserve more weight, or different interpretations of the facts referenced by Putin. But none argued convincingly for the former existence of a Ukrainian national state or even the long term existence of Ukrainian national identity.

In fact their arguments were largely consistent with Putin. The BBC quote Prof Ronald Suny:

Mr Suny points out that the inhabitants of these lands when they were conquered by Russia were neither Russian nor Ukrainian, but Ottoman, Tatar or Cossacks – Slavic peasants who had fled to the frontiers.

Which is absolutely true: 18th century Russia did not conquer a territory called “Ukraine”. Much of the land of Ukraine was under Muslim rule when conquered by Catherine the Great, and nobody  called themselves “Ukrainian”.

The BBC then gives this quote:

But Anita Prazmowska, a professor emerita at the LSE, says that although a national consciousness emerged later among Ukrainians than other central European nations, there were Ukrainians during that period.

“[Vladimir Putin] is using a 20th Century concept of the state based on the protection of a defined nation, as something that goes back. It doesn’t.”

Which is hardly accusing Putin of speaking “nonsense” either. Prazmowska admits the development of Ukrainian national consciousness came “later than other Central European states”, which is very definitely true. Prazmowska herself has a very Central European take – the idea of the nation state in England, Scotland and France, for example, developed well ahead of the period of which she was speaking.

I should address the weakness in Putin’s narrative, around the origins of World War 2. Russian nationalists have great difficulty in accommodating the Stalin/Hitler pact into the narrative of the Great Patriotic War, and while Putin did briefly reference it, his attempt to blame World War 2 essentially on Poland was a low point. But even here, there was a historical truth that the standard Western narrative ignores.

The Rydz-Smigly–led military dictatorship in Poland after the death of Pilsudski was not a pleasant regime. Putin was actually correct about Munich: both the UK and France had asked Poland to allow the Soviet army to march through to bolster Czechoslovakia against Germany, and Poland refused (Ridz-Smigly did not trust Stalin, and frankly I don’t blame him). But this is an example of part of Putin’s narrative that countered the received Western tradition, that most well-informed people in the West have no idea happened, and is perfectly true.

The fusing back then of Ukrainian nationalism with Nazism, and the atrocities of Ukrainian nationalists in WW2 against not just Jews but also Poles and other minorities, were also perfectly true.

It is a simple and stark truth there never was a Ukrainian state before 1991. There just was not. Lands currently comprising Ukraine were at various times under the rule of Muslim Khans, of the Ottomans, of Cossack Hetmans (possibly the closest thing to proto-Ukrainians), the Polish-Lithuanian confederation and Russian Tsars.

As I have stated on this blog before, the boundary between Polish/Lithuanian and Russian influence became settled on the Dnieper. I have also published this map before, showing that history resonates through the current conflict.

There is also the case of third-party recognition of the Ukrainian nationality. I have read, for example, the letters and memoirs, both published and unpublished, of scores of British soldiers and civil servants involved in the Imperial rivalry with Russia in Asia. Many had contact with Russian officers or diplomats. They did clearly recognise different ethnic identities within the Russian Empire. The Russian diplomat Jan Witkiewicz was described repeatedly by British officers as “Polish”, for example. “Cossack” and “Tartar” were frequently used. I cannot recall any of these British sources ever using the description “Ukrainian”.

Nor did British officers who actually passed through Ukraine, like Fred Burnaby and Arthur Connolly, describe it as such in their memoirs. Now I am not claiming that if British imperialists did not notice something, it did not exist. But if there were a centuries-old recognition by the rival Empire of the existence of a Ukrainian national identity, that would definitely mean something. There does not appear to be such.

I should be interested to know where Ukrainian nationalists claim their cultural heritage lies as proof of early national identity. What is the Ukrainian equivalent of Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt speech, of Scotland’s Blind Harry, or even of Poland’s Pan Tadeusz? (This is a genuine question. There may be areas of Ukrainian historic identity of which I am unaware).

Putin was not wrong about history (apart from the dodgy bit about origins of the second world war). But the correct question is whether any of this matters.

It is not whether Putin’s historical analysis is broadly correct, it is whether this matters. I am inclined to the view that Putin is correct that there is little evidence that the people living in Ukraine, hundreds of years ago, ever considered themselves a distinct national entity.

But they are all dead, so they don’t get a vote. The only thing that matters is the opinion of those living there now.

It seems to me beyond dispute that there is now a Ukrainian national identity. I know several Ukrainians who consider themselves joyously and patriotically Ukrainian, just as I know patriotic Ghanaians and even patriotic Uzbeks. The question of how this identity was forged and how recently is not the point.

I should add there are undoubtedly a great many Ukrainians whose sense of national identity is not linked to Nazism. There is a historical and a current strain of Nazism in Ukrainian nationalism, and it is far too tolerated by the Ukrainian state; that is certainly true. But to claim all Ukrainian nationalists are Nazis is a nonsense.

The formation of national identity is a very curious thing. Ivory Coast has just won the African Cup of Nations at soccer, beating Nigeria in the final. The competition arouses huge patriotic fervour throughout the continent of Africa. But the boundaries of all the African nations, except arguably Ethiopia, are entirely artificial colonial constructs. They cut right across ethnic, cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Much of modern Ghana was the old Ashanti kingdom, but that extended much further into now Ivory Coast. The coastal areas were never Ashanti. In the east, the Ewe people’s lands are cut by a completely artificial boundary with Togo. To the north, largely Muslim populations live a much more rural lifestyle. Yet Ghanaians are fiercely proud of this imposed state of Ghana. They are proud it was the first African state to attain Independence, they are proud of its heritage of supporting African liberation movements including the ANC, they are proud of its education system. They have a real sense of national identity that goes far beyond the passionate support of its sporting teams.

Ghanaian identity is modern, ahistoric, within entirely colonial boundaries. But it is real and valid.

In Central Asia, the boundaries of the “stans” are again colonial boundaries that cut right across the pre-existing Khanates. The boundaries of these ex-Soviet republics were carefully designated by Stalin not to be ethnically or culturally coherent, to guard against the development of national opposition. So the greatest Tajik cities, Bokhara and Samarkand, are not in Tajikistan but Uzbekistan.

Uzbekistan has important similarities to Ukraine. Both are states with boundaries of Soviet republics, which have no relationship to any pre-existing state or nation. In both – and this may be a legacy of Soviet authoritarianism – the state has attempted to force national identity by compulsory homogeneity. So Russian language medium in education was first banned in Uzbekistan, and then Tajik. Ukraine has similarly banned the Russian language. This of course is nothing new in state behaviour, as Highland Scots well know.

Yet even in Uzbekistan, a passionate national identity has been created, even among Kazakhs, Tajiks etc who reside there. The alchemy by which this happens is mystifying; partly it seems to depend on a natural loyalty to whatever authority exists, which is a rather troubling thought. For Central Asia, Olivier Roy’s “The New Central Asia, the Creation of Nations” has some thoughts on the sociology of the process. I am aware I need to read more on the creation of national identity, because most of my thought is based on simple observation.

It is however entirely plain that national identity can appear, and can be genuine, and can do so in a period of merely decades. There is now a Ukrainian national identity, and those who subscribe to it have the right to their state.

That they have a right to the former boundaries of Soviet Ukraine is a different proposition. Given the reality that it is plain a significant minority of the population do not subscribe to Ukrainian national identity, that civil war broke out, and that this relates to historic geographic fracture lines, it seems that division of territory is now not only inevitable but desirable.

All people of goodwill should therefore wish to see an end to fighting and a peace settlement, of which the territorial elements are somewhere close to the current lines between the forces, with Russia giving back some territory in return for recognition of its gains. The alternative is more death, human misery and economic malaise.

 
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The post Rethinking Ukraine: Putin and the Mystery of National Identity appeared first on Craig Murray.

Life

I do apologise for the break in articles. Exacerbating the problems of leading an itinerant life, I have suffered a series of remarkable thefts, including of phone, wallet, money and passport, which have caused me a huge amount of disruption.

The post Life appeared first on Craig Murray.

State Secrecy and Public Hearings Part One

At the Assange extradition hearings in Woolwich Crown Court and the Old Bailey, the public gallery was limited to five and sometimes two. The excuse was Covid. But online access was denied to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and numerous other groups and individuals, including journalists. The mainstream media was anyway complicit in leaving the entire hearing virtually unreported – less than one percent of the coverage given to Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard.

The International Court of Justice met at the Hague to consider Israeli genocide, and the entire proceedings were open to anybody in the world with a decent video connection, through an open link and no password. Like the crucial Assange appeal hearings coming in the High Court on 21 and 21 February, the ICJ is a public court. Yet the judges of the London High Court have passed a series of Kafkaesque regulations to limit who can see the trial, under the pretext of open access.

Here is the Stalinist nonsense in its entirety. I promise your mind is going to boggle:

Remember, as that document says, this is a “public hearing”. You have to apply for permission to watch it and state WHY you want to watch it. Presumably “It is a public hearing. By law it has to be public” is not a sufficient reason. There is no guarantee at all that you will be given permission.

You have to be in England or Wales to watch. Applications from Scotland and Northern Ireland will “not normally be granted”. Despite the fact it is the UK government which is extraditing Julian under a UK–USA extradition treaty, not an England and Wales–USA extradition treaty.

Julian is an Australian citizen. But you are not “normally” permitted to watch in Australia. It is the United States government which is seeking to extradite Julian. But citizens of the United States will not “normally” be permitted to view online.

Scots and Irish will not be permitted to view, presumably because their loyalty to the security state is known to be dubious! I have no idea what is the position for the Channel Islands or Isle of Man.

Not only does the Big Brother state want to know your identity and where you are, nobody else is allowed to watch the hearing with you. Why? What harm is it if your mum looks at it? It is a public f***ing hearing.

Who are they scared is going to watch? Why does that scare them? What do they think these naughty people watching are going to do? Are they worried Putin and Xi will be secretly watching and will do some terrible internet magic that collapses the western world? Just what is this crazy restriction about?

Why is nobody outside the state and billionaire media allowed to give live information about what is happening in the Court? Why is it OK if CNN does give live information, but not OK if a concerned citizen does it?

Why does everybody have to be threatened with two years’ imprisonment if they break these crazy rules?

I urge everybody reading this post to contact the court as specified at listoffice@administrativecourtoffice.justice.gov.uk, and apply to watch online, following the rules in para 4 of the court order above. If you are outside the UK, please include in your reasons that the United States is making explicitly in this case a claim of universal jurisdiction for its Espionage Act over the whole world, so everybody is affected including you.

Please then put out on social media that you have applied, and encourage others to apply. Please post updates when you hear back from the court including stating regularly if they don’t reply. Post any answer you get. And go back to them and argue.

Officially this is a “public hearing”. Officially these judges are committed to “open justice”. What a farce. What are they hiding?

 

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The post State Secrecy and Public Hearings Part One appeared first on Craig Murray.