In the next few hours a United Kingdom court could decide whether Julian Assange, WikiLeaks editor accused of revealing secret information of the US Government in 2010 and 2011, has the right to appeal his extradition to the United States, authorized in 2022 by the British Supreme Court and confirmed by the Executive.
Denying that right to the famous Australian
hacker
—whose revelations showed world public opinion facts and strategies that Washington tried to hide for years—can not only mean a sentence of 175 years in prison for a person whose alleged crime was publishing documentation that a Government was hiding. deliberately to their society, but also a serious blow to investigative journalism and, in short, to press freedom throughout the world.
Assange's actions were vital in disseminating information protected by a fallacious use of the concept of state secret.
Among them, documentary evidence of illegal actions by the US army against civilians in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or pressure on the governments of sovereign countries over several decades.
WikiLeaks was a dissemination effort in which media from around the world collaborated, contributing hundreds of professionals who verified the authenticity of the documentation and, in line with journalistic codes of deontology, put into practice the necessary protocols to guarantee that the publication of This information would not endanger the life of any person.
This happened, for example, with the publication starting in 2010 of more than 250,000 documents from the State Department in which EL PAÍS,
The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde
and
Der Spiegel participated.
The harassment suffered by Julian Assange since practically that same date - which forced him to request asylum for seven years from the Government of Ecuador in its embassy in London, where in addition, as EL PAÍS revealed, he was spied on 24 hours a day by a Spanish company - goes beyond Washington's pursuit of an alleged crime of revealing secrets, but rather constitutes an unequivocal way of intimidating the media and their sources.
Certainly, the figure of Assange is controversial.
His judicial problems began with an escape from Swedish justice after being accused of rape and sexual abuse, charges of which he always pleaded innocent and the victim of a setup to extradite him to the United States. He was also accused of being part of Vladimir's strategy. Putin stops destabilizing the West.
Finally, the relationship with the media that disseminated the WikiLeaks information has sometimes been turbulent.
But none of this can hide his decisive role as a necessary actor so that the rights of citizens, especially Americans, were respected when his government acted in the opposite direction.
Much more is decided today in London than the extradition of a private citizen accused of a crime.
What is at stake is, in a time of montages, hoaxes and alternative realities like the one we live in, a rigorous and independent way of doing journalism.
And with it, two pillars of democracy: freedom of the press and the right to information.