Don't shoot the messenger: Julian Assange’s release and its troubling implications for press freedom

The release of Julian Assange is not just a fair outcome of a trial. It is a breakthrough for free, independent and critical journalism worldwide. But it leaves one dangerous precedence.

“A small step for a man. A giant leap for mankind”. Neil Armstrong’s words, as he set his foot on the Moon, came to my mind when I heard the news that Julian Assange Tuesday set foot on British ground as a free man after 1,901 days behind bars at the Belmarsh high-security prison in London.

Julian Assange’s release is not just a fair outcome of a court case. To quote the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), it is “a massive boost for free speech.” The IFJ represents 160,000 journalists from 146 countries and has campaigned for Assange’s release since the publication of US charges against him in 2019.

Without Assange and his organisation “Wikileaks”, the world today would not have known about the American war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo and would not have known that the wars were illegal and partly based on fabricated accusations.

Wikileaks has published 400,000 documents about the wars, including internal reports that documented the killing, torture and rape of at least 15,000 civilians in Iraq. If a similar disclosure had come out about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it would have led to the Pulitzer Prize for excellent journalism. Assange’s case led to a claim of a prison term of up to 175 years.

Independent journalism shows its value when authorities and governments withhold secrets or unwanted truth. As my old journalism teacher once phrased it: “True journalism is revealing unpleasant information, which those in power do not want to be revealed. Revealing wanted, pleasant content is an advertisement, not journalism”.

Investigative journalism about governments’ wrongdoings is impossible without courageous ‘whistleblowers’. Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006, providing whistleblowers a platform to leak classified documents of public interest. In 2010, WikiLeaks was, thanks to former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, able to publish classified US documents which were top secret and confidential, including most infamously, a 2007 video that showed the US Army airstrikes firing on civilians from helicopters, killing several of them. Chelsea Manning was later sentenced to 35 years in military prison for leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks. She was later released, as then US president Barrack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017, citing “disproportionate punishment”.

Sensitive information may be classified by the US if it threatens national security. This is generally accepted by journalists. But on the other hand, the citizens’ right to know is as crucial. Not least in a democracy, where the citizens are supposed to elect their representatives based on a non-manipulated, uncensored knowledge about their doings and wrongdoings.

Classifying information to protect the nation versus the citizens’ right to know are mutually conflicting principles, which leads many to defend one and reject the other. This is where the courts come into the game. The independent courts must, following a fair trial, weigh the two conflicting principles against each other and, after a fair trial, present a balanced, proportionate verdict.

In this case, the citizens’ right to know weighed higher than the US government’s wish to punish the messenger.

This is the right outcome of the Assange case. As freelance journalist Duncan Campbell put in an article in The Guardian prior to the final court hearings in London: “Which is the more serious criminal activity: extrajudicial killings, routine torture of prisoners and illegal renditions carried out by a state, or exposing those actions by publishing illegally leaked details of how, where, when and by whom they were committed? How can exposing crime and torture be worse than committing them?”

Having spent more than five years in a 2×3 meter prison cell, Assange is now a free man. But the Assange case has not ended yet. According to court filings, Assange has agreed with the US Department of Justice to plead guilty to one of the 18 charges: “conspiracy to obtain and disseminate classified information linked to the US national defence”.

This seems an unnecessary ‘face-saving’ deal for the US. If the UK High Court has once judged that the truth weighs higher than the source and that the message is more important than the messenger, the court should dismiss this charge. Otherwise, a juridical Damocles sword will hang over future journalists, threatening to silence the press and keep future state secrets secret despite the citizens’ right to know.

Revealing criminal acts should not be criminal. Journalism is not a crime.

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.