Above Photo: AP Photo
Judge Leonie Brinkema has denied an application from the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press to unseal the U.S. government’s complaint against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. She ruled against a petition to unseal a criminal complaint arguing that there is no proof that it exists. In a ten page ruling she wrote “The Government opposes the Committee’s application on the ground that it has neither confirmed nor denied whether charges have been filed against Assange and cannot be required to disclose that information before an arrest is made.” Assange’s named appeared in a totally unrelated criminal complaint, apparently from a copy and paste mistake. The government called it an “unintentional error.”
Consoritum News reported that Brinkema sided with the government. “The Committee has not demonstrated with sufficient certainty that Assange has been charged,” she wrote.
The judge ruled:
“Until there is a sufficiently certain disclosure that charges have in fact been filed, the Committee’s common law and First Amendment claims are premature. To hold otherwise would mean that any member of the public or press–by demanding access to judicial records based on little more than speculation–could effectively force the Government to admit or deny that charges had been filed.”
Brinkema balanced the public’s right to know with the government’s need to investigate, arrest ad prosecute suspects. In weight=ing that balance she sided with secrecy saying the public’s right is not “absolute.” KZ
MOSCOW (Sputnik) – The Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry said it had been asked by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (part of the Organization of American States), to provide the information related to the WikiLeaks founder’s asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in light of the recently filed motion asking the commission for protection.
“On January 29, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has notified the State of Ecuador about a motion on protection measures which has been filed by the lawyers of Julian Assange. With regard to this, the commission has asked us to provide information concerning the situation in the embassy”, the ministry said in a statement on Thursday.
On 23 January, Assange’s lawyers said they had filed an urgent application to the Washington-based Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR) in order to compel the US authorities to disclose charges against the whistleblower.
In the same statement, the defense team said it had asked the commission to compel Ecuador to cease its espionage activities against Assange, to stop the isolation imposed on him and to protect him from extradition to the United States.
On Tuesday, WikiLeaks said the commission had given Ecuador five days to answer seven questions on threats against Assange’s asylum.Assange, who has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in the United Kingdom, since 2012, has repeatedly said he feared extradition to the United States due to the fact that he had published thousands of leaked classified US authorities’ documents.
His defense team has cited media reports suggesting that Ecuador’s president Lenin Moreno had sought to reach an agreement with the United States on handing Assange over to Washington in exchange for debt relief.
Moreover, WikiLeaks and a number of US media outlets published in November what they claimed was court filing in an unrelated case including some sealed charges, which used Assange’s name in an “apparent cut-and-paste error”.The outlets then suggested that the existence of these files meant existing charges brought against Assange by the US authorities.
In October, the Ecuadorian authorities have introduced a protocol restricting Assange communications. The activist’s defense team said the new home rules were a violation of Assange’s rights.