Monday 29th of April 2024
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justice at the hands of the blind, one-eyed cyclops .....

justice at the hands of the blind, one-eyed cyclops .....

America's international standing as a fair and just country does not match its superpower status as the world's greatest democracy.

When it comes to basic human rights it is there in the gutter alongside some of the world's most toxic, tinpot dictatorships and authoritarian regimes.

So there's little surprise that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange fears being extradited to The States where some politicians and Pentagon officials have already called for his execution and Attorney General Eric Holder admits his government may invoke the US Espionage Act.

But it's not just the persecution and the prosecution Assange should fear, either - the wheels of justice can be agonisingly slow in a process which could take years. And in the case of the Guantanamo detainees there is no end in sight - the majority of them have not been charged but simply forgotten.

Having stepped inside US prisons - both military and civilian - I can tell you there is nothing civilised about the penal institutions in the United States.

Four days of filming inside Guantanamo and half a day at one of California's largest young offenders prisons provided me with enough material to reach this conclusion, bearing in mind as a journalist I was just shown "the good bits"!

Having also viewed CCTV footage of detainees in US institutions being strip and cavity searched was equally traumatic and for those who showed the slightest resistance a procedure would follow which in my view is tantamount to gang rape.

Frankly, I was appalled by what I saw inside American jails and the interviews and research which followed did not make easy reading.

I wondered how the US could really describe itself as a civilised, mature democracy.

And if you doubt my judgment here are a few statistics to play with in a prison system where 70 per cent of the inmates are non-whites.

* The US has a higher percentage of its citizenry in prison than any other country in history;

* 25 percent of the world's prison population - around 2.3 million - are caged in America;

* More than a quarter of US inmates are black males between the ages of 20 and 39 and over the course of a lifetime, 28 percent of all black American men will have spent some time behind bars in what can only be described as a racist-driven judicial system.

As 2011 dawns the British Prime Minister David Cameron is faced with some hard choices this year, none more difficult than probably deciding whether or not to scrap our extradition treaty with the US and refuse to hand over a group of British citizens to Barak Obama's America.

And make no mistake, if he wanted to, he could tell the Obama Administration to "get stuffed". His coalition government is stronger than the previous Labour governments ... under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown human rights, civil liberties and freedoms were diminished both at home and abroad.

It was Blair's government that introduced the one-sided 2003 Extradition Treaty to please and appease the Bush Administration. Legislation drawn up in panic and haste is never a good idea nor was it wise to allow America to extend its jurisdiction in to the UK for that is exactly what has happened. And I wonder if the legislation was really drawn up by UK lawyers since a close inspection of the original documents reveal the liberal use of American English.

I would urge Cameron to resist all of the existing US Extradition requests just as he would if the same demands were being made by some Banana Republic.

This has nothing to do with innocence or guilt, by the way, but everything to do with the just treatment of human beings - justice should be meted out equally, without fear or favour but in America the accused are often judged by the colour of their skin, religion and class.

The evidence is there for all to see - America's human rights record is appalling, the prison system is a disgrace and the way it treats its own convicted citizens, let alone foreigners, is primitive.

US Justice On Trial

meanwhile, from the moral-high-ground dept .....

Wikileaks Reveals That The US Won't Comply With Treaty Obligations Concerning Investigations Into CIA Rendition.....

This is hardly a surprise, but it's increasingly being confirmed by the various State Department cable leaks that the US Justice Department is failing to comply with its treaty obligations with other countries in their investigations into US (mainly CIA) "rendition" operations, where they take people captured elsewhere and find some place to torture them.

Related to this, of course, is that US diplomats worked overtime to suppress any investigations, and put strong diplomatic pressure on countries not to investigate. And yet, some still did, and the US simply refused to cooperate, despite requirements under various treaties.

This is, of course, nothing new. The US has a history of ignoring treaties when it doesn't like what they say. This is seriously going to come back to haunt the US. It's amazing how upset the US gets when others ignore treaty provisions, but it does the same all too often.

Wikileaks Reveals That The US Won't Comply With Treaty Obligations Concerning Investigations Into CIA Rendition

 

the american way: our way or the highway .....

In London this morning, a British court held a procedural hearing regarding Sweden's attempt to extradite Julian Assange in order to question him about sex crimes accusations.  Afterward, Assange's lawyers released an outline of the arguments they intend to make in opposition to extradition.  Most of them centered around the impermissibility of extraditing someone who has not been charged with a crime -- i.e., merely to interrogate them -- but one of the featured arguments focused on the danger that if Assange were sent to Sweden, that country would then extradite him to the U.S., where Assange would be subjected to grave injustices:

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, could be at "real risk" of the death penalty or detention in Guantánamo Bay if he is extradited to Sweden on accusations of rape and sexual assault, his lawyers claim.

In a skeleton summary of their defence against attempts by the Swedish director of public prosecutions to extradite him, released today, Assange's legal team argue that there is a similar likelihood that the US would subsequently seek his extradition "and/or illegal rendition", "where there will be a real risk of him being detained at Guantánamo Bay or elsewhere".

Paragraphs 92-99 of the outline detail Sweden's history of violating the Convention Against Torture by rendering War on Terror suspects to Egypt to be tortured, and concludes:  "based on its record as condemned by the United Nations Committee against Torture and the Human Rights Committee, Sweden would bow to US pressure and/or rely naively on diplomatic assurances from the USA that Mr. Assange would not be mistreated, with the consequence that he would be deported/expelled to the USA, where he would suffer serious ill-treatment."  This danger is legally relevant because the governing Extradition Act bars the expulsion of a prisoner where "extradition would be [in]compatible with the Convention rights within the meaning of the Human Rights Act 1998."  The outline also cited vigilante calls from leading right-wing figures for Assange's murder (yesterday, it was discovered that a prominent right-wing blogger, Melissa Clouthier, had registered the website JulianAssangeMustDie.com). 

It's quite notable that the mere threat of ending up in American custody is considered (at least by Assange's lawyers) to be a viable basis for contesting extradition on human rights grounds. Indeed, this argument is not unusual.  Numerous countries often demand, as a condition for extradition to the U.S., assurances from the U.S. Government that the death penalty will not be applied.  Similarly, there are currently cases pending in EU courts contesting the extradition of War on Terror detainees to the U.S. on the ground that they will be treated inhumanely by virtue of the type of prolonged, intensive solitary confinement to which Bradley Manning -- and thousands of other actual convicts -- are subjected.  

And now we have the spectacle of Julian Assange's lawyers citing the Obama administration's policies of rendition and indefinite detention at Guantanamo as a reason why human rights treaties bar his extradition to any country (such as Sweden) which might transfer him to American custody.  Indeed, almost every person I've spoken who has or had anything to do with WikiLeaks expresses one fear above all others:  the possibility that they will end up in American custody and subjected to its lawless War on Terror "justice system." 

Americans still like to think of themselves as "leaders of the free world," but in the eyes of many, it's exactly the "free world" to which American policies are so antithetical and threatening.

What U.S. "Justice" Signifies Around The World

and, from Crikey .....

Assange legal team's skeleton argument on strong ground

Greg Barns, a barrister and director of the Australian Lawyers Alliance, writes

JULIAN ASSANGE, JULIAN ASSANGE RAPE CASE, WIKILEAKS, WIKILEAKS AUSTRALIA, WIKILEAKS CABLES, WIKILEAKS NEWS

Julian Assange's lawyers are going for the jugular in their attack on the Swedish and UK government's attempts to extradite Assange to Sweden where there is an investigation under way concerning his alleged in involvement in s-xual offences. Not only do Assange's lawyers run the usual arguments about the offences not being extradition offences -- that is, there are no like charges in English law -- but they say that the Swedish prosecutor who wants Assange extradited has no authority to do so, and that the whole thing is an abuse of process.

Strong stuff, but if the 35-page skeleton argument that Assange's legal team has filed overnight with the City of Westminster Magistrates Court, ahead of the hearing in early February, is correct in its view of the law, then the Swedes are cactus! (See video here of Assange's brief appearance at Belmarsh Magistrates' court in London overnight.)

The Swedish prosecutor who is handling the Assange s-x offences matter, Marianne Ny, a Public Prosecutor in Gothenburg, has no power to seek extradition, say Assange's lawyers. The submission cites media statements by Ny and correspondence she had with the Australian High Commission in London in December in which she made it clear that her "purpose in requesting an arrest warrant, and subsequently an [extradition warrant], against Assange, was not in order to prosecute him, but in order to facilitate his 'interrogation', i.e. to facilitate his questioning."

Assange's lawyers correctly cite a line of strong and unambiguous English and European legal authority that says that you cannot extradite a person merely to question them. And you certainly cannot do so when there is documented evidence, as there is in this case, that Assange's lawyers have repeatedly told the Swedish authorities that Assange was more than happy to meet them for questioning.

As to Ny's argument that there was no other way of her getting Assange into the Gothenburg interviewing room, Assange's lawyers say this is false.

What also emerges from Assange's lawyers' submission is that Ny has not complied with the cardinal principle of full disclosure -- in other words, an accused person is entitled to see all the evidence against him. In the Assange case, much has been made of text messages said to have been sent by the women Assange is said to have slept with, including one where one of the women says she was half asleep. Other "messages from and between the complainants that the Swedish Prosecutor has refused to disclose but which Assange's lawyer, (Bjorn) Hurtig, has seen (but was not allowed by the prosecutor to take notes or copies of), speak of revenge and of the opportunity to make lots of money and of going to the Swedish national newspaper, Expressen," says the submission.

In short, Assange's lawyers must be provided with copies of such potentially useful evidence before matters go any further.

By refusing Assange's legal team access to the text messages, Ny is caught on the horns of a painful dilemma, argue Assange's lawyers. And they are right.

In perhaps the most damaging portion of the submission, Ny is accused of abuse of process because either "Assange's extradition is sought for purposes of prosecution, and thus a decision has been taken as to his prosecution and he is then entitled under Swedish law to disclosure of the entire investigation file, including the SMS messages and blog evidence -- and yet these crucial items of evidence have not been disclosed to him, representing a serious violation of Swedish criminal procedure law and dereliction of duty on the part of Ny, and thus an abuse of process", or "Mr Assange's extradition is not being sought for the purposes of prosecution, in which case it should not have been sought at all. Either way, it is an abuse of process for Ms Ny to proceed in the way in which she is doing."

The final argument raised by Assange's lawyers, and one that should be supported by the Gillard government (but don't hold your breath) is that if Assange is extradited, compliant Swedish authorities will allow the Americans to swoop on Assange and dump him in Guantanamo Bay or some other place of torture. This is a genuine threat given the extremist nature of the American political and legal responses to Assange so far and because of the pressure on President Obama to tack to the hard right on the issue.

Julian Assange's legal team is on very strong ground and English courts have in recent years repeatedly shown a robustness that the political class of that country lacks when it comes to human rights. It would be a surprise if Assange were handed to the likes of Ny and the Americans, given that to do so would be to hand him over to a political and diplomatic witch-hunt in Sweden and the US.