Letters | Why Julian Assange suffered for so many years in the free world

Readers discuss Western treatment of a non-Chinese dissident like the WikiLeaks founder, cross-border travel permits for non-Chinese residents of Hong Kong, and how to turn the US election into a win-win for the city

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange leaves a US
courthouse in Saipan, capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, on June 26, after pleading guilty to a felony charge of violating the Espionage Act under a plea deal. Photo: AFP

Published: 11:30am, 3 Jul 2024

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By publishing classified US documents, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange did humanity a favour. Through the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, he exposed evidence of possible war crimes such as the killing and torture of civilians and detainees perpetrated or condoned by the US and Nato forces.

However, then United States president Barack Obama described Assange’s leaks as “deplorable” while US senator Mitch McConnell called him a “hi-tech terrorist”. Former US House speaker Newt Gingrich declared that he should be “treated as an enemy combatant”. US federal employees were banned from accessing WikiLeaks on government computers.

Assange was arrested by the British police in 2010 in response to a warrant issued by Swedish prosecutors who suspected him of committing sexual crimes. He sought refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in the United Kingdom to avoid extradition to Sweden. The case was eventually dropped after he was dragged out of the embassy in 2019, but he was in jail for five more years while fighting extradition to the US on an Espionage Act indictment.

The mainstream media have hardly shown any zest for promoting him as a champion of press freedom. In 2011, a Guardian column noted that “the US journalistic community is backing away from Assange”. A 2010 opinion piece in The Washington Post called for his prosecution.

Assange is a Western dissident. He does not enjoy the Western sympathy that might be afforded to a Chinese dissident. His cause may be noble but the forces that determine his fate are powerful and merciless. For example, Chelsea Manning was held in solitary confinement on suspicion of being the WikiLeaks source, and the UN special rapporteur on torture accused the US government of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment towards the soldier.