Although Assange did not personally enter the jurisdiction of the United States, he did incite an agent (Manning) to commit espionage and steal government property within the United States, going so far as to provide her with tools and instructions on how to do so. This is how a lot of international crime works. A lot of the big players do not actually set foot in a country while committing crimes there. This is how Mueller’s team was able to prosecute (in absentia) a bunch of Russian hackers.
Jurisdiction refers to where the crime was committed, not where the criminal was physically located.
So many of the arguments here assume that Assange has to have entered the US or has to be a US citizen in order to be subject to extradition, and that is quite simply not the case.
I’m sorry, but in what way is espionage a political offense? That is not my understanding of espionage at all. Though some clauses of the Espionage Act do indeed refer to political crimes, I do not see how espionage in general could be considered a political offense.
I do understand that false charges of espionage are often used as a pretext to detain somebody, but I do not believe that is the case here.
You seem to have a big United States shaped hole in your acceptance of extradition.
Assage is accused of committing a crime inside the United States, which is a rather key for the ability of the US to request his extradition.
Extraditing people for crimes committed while physically oustide the requesting jurisidiction is not new. Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah were extradicted to the Netherlands to stand trial for acts committed while physically in Malta. Kim Dotcom was extradicted to the US for acts committed while physically in New Zealand. “El Chapo” Guzman was extradicted to the US for acts committed while physcially in Mexico. Minh Quang Pham was extradicted to the US for for acts committed while physically in the UK and Yemen. Osama bin Laden was notoriously sought by the US for acts comitted while he was physically in Afghanistan.
If there’s a problem with the Assange extradition it’s not that he wasn’t physically inside the US, it’s that the charges are bullshit.
The text of the US-UK extradition treaty and the courts would be among the likely limits in the UK. If you’re in China or Russia or are a citizen of France resident there you don’t need to worry too much about being extradited to the US.
In each of those examples you cited, I always asked myself, is this right? I think it is BOTH a questionable practice and bs charges. Imagine a small, yet powerful nation in Africa with the ability to whip up BS charges and grab people off the streets anywhere in the world with impunity. It would be horrifying that they could do this, as well as horrifying they would concoct such BS charges against people.
Of course not–WL was just disseminating the documents those people illegally obtained, in direct coordination with Trump’s campaign to maximize their benefit. All hypothetically, of course.
Well, A) that literally just happened, that Rwanda just snatched Rusesbagina off the street (not to mention that there are several cases of the Israelis doing this, with wide public support for arresting Nazi war criminals for obvious reasons), and B) the way your phrase that makes it seem like a routine practice of powerful European countries would be be somehow more horrific if Black people did it.
Obviously, any nation-state acting with impunity around the world is problematic as it makes a mockery of national sovereignty and international law, but bringing out a counterfactual that is a scaremongering tactic routinely used to justify neo-colonialism isn’t particularly helpful in supporting your argument about the US and Assange, I don’t think.
Israel kidnapping Mordechai Vanunu in Italy for revealing Israeli nuclear secrets was more controversial, but they got away with it without any significant backlash.
I didn’t read it that way. I read it as more an observation that systemic racism (and, more significantly, bias toward the industrialized North) is a routine feature of international politics as well as US domestic politics. As a result, the US (and Russia as well) get away with behaviour that would be denounced and face reprisals if a smaller nation were to practice it. It’s no better when the US does it, it’s just that the rest of the world appears powerless to resist it.
It’s hard to invoke the ‘turnabout would be fair play’ motif without treading close to the ‘neocolonialism’ scare story, because a hypothetical nation anywhere in the Third World would invoke it; invoking Israel or any Muslim-majority state would play into a different narrative (and invoking any nation of the fromer Eastern Bloc would play into yet another offensive one), Naming, say, Belgium, would be too implausible - the Belgians can’t manage to elect a government for their own country; how could they possibly have ambitions beyond their borders?
Now that you’ve made me aware of the problem, had I wanted to make the post myself, I might have fallen back on invoking fictional little Grand Fenwick or Qwlghm in trying to advance the argument that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
At least the Rusesbagina and Vanunu incidents were perpetrated against nationals of the countries that perpetrated them. There’s a certain amount of tolerance for a “friendly” power retrieving its own people by what could be called ‘informal extradition.’ There’s a lot less tolerance for snatching and grabbing a country’s own citizens, or visitors to that country from a third country, Nazi war criminals excepted.
I was not aware of that, thanks. I agree it’s more controversial than Nazi hunting.
Yes, but I can see how it can be read the way I said. And if saw that, others could to. It’s problematic framing, even though I know that wasn’t @Wally’s intent.
But Wakanda doesn’t exist… neither do African nations that DO exist have the ability (for the most part) to employ the rule of international law for their own benefit in the way that the US can (unless that nation has American backing). But African nations getting that sort of power within the interstate system is a constant boogeyman because it’s seen as upsetting the “right” order of things. How we talk about these things actually does matter.
But this is getting off topic. Assange is an asshole who purposefully worked to throw the election to Donald Trump and likely committed sexual assault. He also probably shouldn’t be extradited to the US. I don’t know where that leaves us, other than these conversations always seem to go nowhere.
Correct, not my intent here. At first I had “country in Central America” then at the last minute changed it to Africa, not because of race but because of being “sufficiently far away and therefore far-fetched.” But really, any non-USA country would have done for that example. The takeaway was meant to be that concept of turnabout that @kennykb explained, not scaremongering. It’s scary already because it’s ALREADY HAPPENING! Ack!!!
What about insisting on fair ones? That’s what most people want. I know I don’t want anyone I care about to go rot in prison in some faraway place for BS reasons. Hey - that could start to happen more, if the fascists get even more power. They will target us on the left and all hell could break loose around the world. Things could get dicey in a hurry, and I realllllly don’t want that, so insisting on fair play is not unreasonable.
Exactly - how do we even talk about this? It’s so fucked up.
It’s still problematic, given how the global north still dominates the global south. International law was built specifically to benefit the wealthy north, because it’s assumed that they won’t abuse it, even though this abuse happens on the regular.
The problem is that the global north regularly steps all over the rule of law as it exists and then justifies itself via force. It ends up making attempts to enforce the law in the global south an act of utter hypocrisy.
It would help if some people didn’t deify Assange.
In the case that he actively helped get the current president elected, the entire fucking country. There are currently nearly 200,000 people dead that most likely would not have died under a sane administration. This doesn’t deal with the larger problem of the projection of American power, but it does matter. A destabilized America is a problem for the rest of the world. A nuclear armed fascist America could cause even worse problems.
But that is more proving of my original point - he should have gone back to Sweden to face those charges as soon as they were brought. The USA should not have been able to play an Ace and overstep Sweden.
