Opinion: Citizen of the World on Trial

Will Julian Assange Be Freed on May 20?

The High Court of London could set Julian Assange free on Monday, May 20. Assange, who is arguably the most consequential journalist of the 21^st century, has been imprisoned for the past five years. However, a remarkable campaign of global activism, spearheaded by his wife, Stella, has placed tremendous pressure on the Biden administration to end this political prosecution.

Amnesty International recently released the following statement on behalf of Assange: “If Julian Assange is extradited to the US for publishing sensitive material leaked by others, the message to journalists and publishers everywhere is simple: you are not safe.”

 Assange, perhaps more than any other journalist in the history of reporting, has been a man without a country, a citizen of the world. Although Assange, an Australian, has been ignored until recently by his home country, people from all over the globe have spoken up, and demonstrated, for the journalist ever since he was forced into Belmarsh Prison in London at the behest of the Trump administration in April of 2019.

“Julian Assange truly represents a core value of why we are free—because we have freedom of the press. Let him be a free man,” wrote the Chinese dissident, Ai Weiwei on X.

Along with a host of other activists and mathematicians, Assange formed WikiLeaks in Iceland in 2006. The reporting of WikiLeaks helped reveal the “Petrogate” scandal in Peru, disclosed extrajudicial executions in Kenya, and may have even helped topple the Calderon government in Mexico in 2012 due to pulling back the curtain on counternarcotics operations there. In 2021, Mexico’s president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador offered Assange asylum, as reported by Reuters.

“Assange is a journalist and deserves a chance,” Obrador said at the time. “We’ll give him protection.”

Obrador is not the only head of state to speak up in Stella Assange’s campaign to liberate her husband. Last year, after attending the coronation of Charles II in London, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, lambasted the British and American governments for criminalizing journalism.

“It is an embarrassment that a journalist who denounced trickery by one state against another is arrested, condemned to die in jail, and we do nothing to free him,” Lula said, as reported by the AP. “We talk about freedom of expression; the guy is in prison because he denounced wrongdoing. And the press doesn’t do anything in defense of this journalist. I can’t understand it.”

Lula has a point. Reuters reports that multiple Italian cities, including Rome, Naples, and Reggio Emilia, have all bestowed honorary citizenship awards on Assange. Meanwhile, many in America’s mainstream media pretend this man does not exist. Assange is the elephant in the room in the Biden administration that regularly gives lip service to the idea of a “rule-based international order” at the same time it conducts an unprecedented escalation of censorship operations.

“The free press is a pillar—maybe the pillar—of a free society, not the enemy,” Biden said last year.

And yet, more than three years into his first term, Biden continues to persist with the prosecution of Assange that began under Donald Trump. Perhaps this is one of the reasons Americans are abandoning Biden, whose approval ratings continue to plummet.

“Assange is a hero,” wrote Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on X in November 2023. “Should our democracy survive, future generations will regard his persecution as a shameful episode comparable to the Army-McCarthy hearings and the Dred Scott decision.”

Will our democracy survive? Does it exist in the first place? The May 20 hearing at the High Court will focus on two sets of assurances from the Biden government. The first set concerns the death penalty and the second set concerns free speech. The UK’s High Court expressed doubt that the United States could provide free speech protections to Assange, who is not a citizen of the USA, but the death penalty issue is an open question as well.

Ultimately, this case may depend on the fate of America’s upcoming presidential election. Kennedy sees Assange as a hero. Biden, who has failed to close America’s torture gulag, Guantánamo Bay, has compared Assange to a “hi-tech terrorist.” Meanwhile, Trump, whose CIA plotted the assassination of Assange, has gone even further than Biden, pondering in 2010 that Assange should receive “the death penalty or something.”

To be unequivocally clear, we here at Honest Media, read Assange as an innovative publisher and a fellow journalist. Like the New York Times and nearly every major newspaper in the world, we stand in solidarity with Assange and believe that Joe Biden should set this journalist free.