After nine years of legal battles, a British judge has finally challenged the wall of secrecy erected by British and Swedish authorities around the legal abuse of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Judge Foss, sitting at the London First-Tier Tribunal, has ruled that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) must explain how it came to destroy key files that would have shed light on why it pursued Assange for 14 years. The CPS appears to have done so in breach of its own procedures.
Assange was finally released from Belmarsh high-security prison last year in a plea deal after Washington had spent years seeking his extradition for publishing documents revealing US and UK war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The CPS files relate to lengthy correspondence between the UK and Sweden over a preliminary investigation into rape allegations in Sweden that predate the US extradition case.
A few CPS emails from that time were not destroyed and have been released under Freedom of Information rules. They show that it was the UK authorities pushing reluctant Swedish prosecutors to pursue the case against Assange. Eventually, Swedish prosecutors dropped the case after running it into the ground.
In other words, the few documents that have come to light show that it was the CPS – led at that time by Keir Starmer, later knighted and now Britain’s prime minister – that waged what appears to have been a campaign of political persecution against Assange, rather than one based on proper legal considerations.
It is not just Britain concealing documents relating to Assange. The US, Swedish and Australian authorities have also put up what Stefania Maurizi, an Italian journalist who has been doggedly pursuing the FoI requests, has called “a wall of darkness”.
Hellbound and Down 