The Inconvenient Trio: The West’s Assange Conundrum In The Wake of Snowden’s Freedoms and Navalny’s Death

By 5 pm London time, on Wednesday this week, the West may have finally entered a new phase of what appears to be an onward process of becoming a defacto Police state. In what will have been a remarkable about-face, the British High Court ruling of whether Julian Assange, an Australian national, can be extradited from the UK to face espionage charges against publications he leaked from a Swedish-based website, and be sent to prison in the United States will determine what kind of new West is emerging. It is, in some respects unfortunate that Assange didn’t re-emerge in Russia, where a similar case involving Edward Snowden has seen that individual enjoy a life of freedom. Assange has spent the past five years locked up at Belmarsh prison, one of the UK’s highest security institutions.

Should Assange be extradited, the implications are grim for the future of the human right to freedom of speech, and for highlighting when governments themselves are acting inappropriately. Assange, in leaking US classified documents provided to him by the US whistleblower Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning most certainly embarrassed the US government but at the same time exposed inconvenient truths about Washington spying on its allies and engaging in illegal behaviors. The charges Assange faces in the United States could result in 157 years in prison. There are substantial concerns that he would not last long if convicted in a US courtroom – there are already concerns about his health. That isn’t an absolution from attending court, but it does add to why he is being pursued in this way in the first place.

Manning, an American citizen who stole the documents, was sentenced to 35 years at the maximum-security U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. On January 17, 2017, that was subsequently commuted and he/she (Manning underwent a sex change) eventually served just seven years. There’s no way of knowing how the US will react in terms of Assange’s sentencing, but there have been calls for him to face capital punishment. A pardon seems very unlikely.

Publicly, the whole case seems to hang on the United States wanting revenge. Revenge against a non-US citizen who published (not stole) information about US Government activities and did so from an EU-based (and now NATO member) website. It brings together Australia, the EU, the UK, and the United States as a bloc that appears quite content to allow for the prosecution by American laws that are now seen to stretch beyond US borders and can capture and punish anyone, of any nationality, anywhere in the Western world. For publishing information that revealed illegal activity.

This can be compared in some cases to the unfortunate Alexei Navalny, who died last week in a Siberian prison. Navalny has consistently been described as an ‘opposition leader’ in Russia, whereas in fact he never held political office. The political party he founded in Russia has never been formally registered. When he ran for the position of Mayor of Moscow he received less than 30% of the vote (the eventual winner won 51%). He has rebranded the political party he formed four times after each failure to gain sufficient support.

To garner grassroots support, he turned to Russian political activism and rather than pay attention to why his political policies were proving unattractive (he had previously described all Muslims as ‘scum’) began by criticizing Russia’s main political parties and some of its largest corporations. This gained him media exposure but also enemies. He was twice accused of embezzling money from his political party and received suspended sentences on both occasions while continuing his activism. In a much-publicized article and interview, he described Russia’s ruling political party as a ‘gang of crooks and thieves’. Organising political protests, and gaining much media attention in the West (without ever actually serving as an elected Russian Member of Parliament) Navalny was eventually arrested and sentenced to 30 years imprisonment for corruption, contempt of court, and ‘extremism’. In the West, he is viewed as a Martyr.

But his death, while partially convenient for Moscow, also created some problems. President Putin had been seen to have made some global positive impressions after the Tucker Carlson interview, but Navalny’s death, while incarcerated, has negated much of that. That too, is partially the result of almost immediate Western media attention, some of it ghoulish, commenting about likely causes before Russia has conducted an autopsy report. But the end result is that Navalny has gone, and a cause of embarrassment for the Kremlin has been removed, deliberately or otherwise.

The curious timing about all this, and the subsequent criticism of President Putin, Russian politics in general, and the rights to freedom of speech is that we will learn on Wednesday, the outcome of Julian Assange’s trial, when a cause of embarrassment for Washington may have been removed – and in Assange’s case, very deliberately indeed. Irony? Hypocrisy? The Rule of Law? What it will determine is how free the West is when compared to Russia. Alexei Navalny was a Russian political hooligan with a criminal record for theft. Edward Snowden, an American, is alive and well and living in Moscow with his wife and child. Julian Assange, an Australian publisher, who released material in the EU, could be extradited from the UK and face life in an American high-security prison.

Wednesday afternoon, London time will reveal the latest in this absurd trilogy of inconvenient truths.