 Welcome to Consortium News's live coverage of the High Court decision in the case of US versus Julian Assange. I'm Joe Laurier, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News. It was very much a dark day for press freedom. If Julian Assange does not get relief at the UK Supreme Court, it would not be an exaggeration to say that while for some time it's been on life support that democracy will die. The US and its ally Britain have so far behaved no better than a tin pot dictator throwing its press critics into a dungeon. The judgment by the High Court today to allow a Saundersack tradition to the US comes on the day that the United States is concluding its so-called Democracy Summit, and the same day when the Nobel Prize was awarded to two journalists in Stockholm, one of whom condemned Julian Assange and said the purpose of journalism is to support national security. That's exactly what the national security state wants from its journalists. And they reward them with the highest honors. Assange did the opposite. He fulfilled journalism's supreme purpose and he may be about to pay for it with his life. Let's get into the details of what happened at the High Court today. It began at 1015 am London time. We viewed it live by a video link up to the courtroom. Lord Justice Timothy Holroyd read a nine minute summary of the decision, which is a 27 page document. Holroyd was there alone. Lord Chief Justice Ian Duncan Burnett did not show up. It was recently a story by Declassified UK showing what a close friend Duncan has been from college days all the way through the last 40 years with Duncan with Alan Duncan who was in fact the driving force in the United States to get Assange out of the embassy working with the United States. So Holroyd was alone and Burnett did not show up today. Burnett of course had let Lori Lovego on a somewhat similar case of a suicide threat that prevented an extradition to the United States. He published 27 pages, essentially said nothing else mattered except the assurances that the United States gave to the United Kingdom. Solemn assurances is how the court described them. What are these assurances? These assurances came from the US to the UK and a diplomatic note saying that if Julian Assange war extradited to the United States, he would not be put in harsh prison conditions. Could that be in Alexandria detention center when he first arrives pre-trial or in ADX Florence in Colorado afterward. Curiously in that diplomatic note they made an error by saying that Assange wouldn't be in a Colorado pre-trial. Colorado was only after a trial not before. So the essence of those assurances are to Britain that they didn't have to worry about sending a man who was prone to suicide into a prison system that would very likely cause him to commit suicide. So this was the key to the United States and the High Court accepted that this was the key point front and center to the decision by District Judge Vanessa Baraitza after the September 2020 hearing. She made that judgment January 4 of this year that Assange should not be extradited to the US because of the high risk that he would commit suicide. The US argued and Baraitza accepted that just the mere threat or knowledge that he would be extradited could be enough to push Julian Assange over the edge. But the US rejected that in the High Court accepted their argument that it was the prison conditions. That was the key factor that would cause his suicide. And since the US promises that they won't put him in those conditions. So this is for Baraitza's judgment any longer and it should be overturned as it was today and her order to discharge Julian Assange was quashed. What the High Court could have done of course they could have decided with Assange which would have made it a very interesting decision for the Biden administration whether to drop the case or to continue to pursue it. That did not happen. They don't have to make that decision. In other words the other choice was the one that they could have sent it back to the High Court could have sent it back to the magistrates court to re hear the case with new evidence with the same arguments again. That was rejected by the High Court they went for the extreme measure really of telling the lower court magistrates court to send this case to the secretary of state for justice Dominic Robb. And now at this point up to Robb to decide whether to extradite Assange or not now the Dominic Robb is the man who would not allow Julian Assange and his partner Stella Maris fiance to get married in prison. After they had to sue the department the Ministry of Justice, they reverse themselves and they will be allowed to marry in the prison so this is the man who was that harsh. It's his decision whether to send Assange to the United States. However, that can be delayed and we have every reason to believe Assange's lawyers have said in the past that they will now bring this case to the UK Supreme Court, which can accept it. It could also reject the case. In order to go through the motions to do the proper procedures to tie the bow on this if they are bent on sending Assange to the US, they need to allow him to go to the Supreme Court. I think that will probably happen, but we don't know for sure yet. But that will be an application from the Assange team to the UK Supreme Court, which could if they wanted to overturn this high court decision and re Institute the order not to extradite and to discharge Assange once again. That would be legally the end of the road in the United Kingdom. He would theoretically be a free man Assange, but James Lewis, their British prosecutor in the high court hearing that was held at the end of October that the court decided on today. He made a threat that they could issue another extradition order for Assange to start the proceedings all over again. This is not a criminal trial where there is a risk of double jeopardy. So you could start it all over again. That's something the US would have up their sleeve. Maybe if the court should decide in Assange's favor, if they in fact take the case. I can't stress enough that this was all about the assurances. Because there were five grounds of appeal for the United States and the High Court ruled against the US in three of those cases, only on two. And the two were that they should accept the assurances and that the lower court judge had not acted properly and not informing the US that she was going to make the decision she was going to make to give them time to put these assurances forward before her decision was handed down. Nevertheless, the US argued in the High Court agreed that at any point in this process, even after that decision, the US can put forward those assurances. I just want to see if I can find some of this language because it's pretty strong that about the solemnness of these assurances here. There's no reason. This is the judgment of the High Court today. There's no reason why this court should not accept the assurances as meaning what they say there's no basis for assuming that the USA has not given the assurances in good faith. Nevertheless, Assange's lawyers had argued that these assurances are not reliable. That's what Amnesty International, by the way, said, and there was a case of a Spanish case by a man Mendoza. He was lied to this Richard Medherst did a piece a couple of days or a week or so ago in which he came up with documents to show that. So there's evidence that the US breaks its word. These are aspirational as Assange's lawyer Mark Summers said in the High Court hearing on at the end of October because if Assange commits some offense while he's in US custody in US soil, they could in fact then put him on a special administrative measure. So these are not in any way ironclad guarantees, but the High Court was able to accept this issue of Michael Koppelman, which I'll get into in a way, even though they criticize Koppelman severely. They agree with the parades that had the right to accept his testimony. The US wanted to throw it out. Koppelman was the defense witness, the expert witness who said that along with Quentin Dealey, another expert witness that Assange was suicidal. And that what Koppelman had done was to hide the existence of Stella Morris's relationship with Assange and the two children they had while Assange was in the embassy. This is a pure technicality because he did reveal that information before the September 2020 expedition hearing resumed. So the US was well aware of that knowledge before the hearing began. Why did Koppelman say he did that because Stella Morris and the children were under threat? By whom? By UC Global. Who are they working for? We now know the Central Intelligence Agency. The words Central Intelligence Agency separately are put together or the acronym CIA appears nowhere in this 27 page High Court ruling. And it's not as if they didn't hear about it because the court surprisingly allowed Summers, the Assange lawyer, to go into great detail about the CIA plot to kill or kidnap Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy. The extradition hearing September 20 had already heard about this plot from testimony of UC Global former employees and a former partner that was read in court. Anonymously. So Beretsa knew about this. But when the Yahoo story came out a month or two ago, two months ago, what great detail about what that CIA plot involved, that changed this story, especially in terms of the threat that the United States posed to Julian Assange. And so Summers was allowed in the High Court hearing at the end of October to give details about what the CIA plot entailed and made the point that it would be wrong to extradite Julian Assange to the United States to a country whose intelligence services had threatened to kill him. In any other case, I don't believe this would be accepted. But this is not a normal case as so many people following this case, including Assange lawyers have said they want to get Julian Assange, not only to make an example of him, but to stop him and they've successfully done that by keeping him in Communicado for more than two years now from doing his work. And what was that work? The work that Maria raised to the Nobel laureate today did not do, which is to challenge the national security state to go after the facts to reveal criminality and corruption. And that is traditionally the role of journalism and it's dead with this case. If the US and Britain can get away with throwing this guy in jail for the rest of his life, what happens to the future of journalism? I'm not exaggerating, this is not hyperbole. And without journalism, where does a democratic system stand? As Jefferson said, if he had to choose between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, he would choose the latter, the newspapers. Journalism is at absolute threat by this decision today, which was taken very quickly. As I said, nine minutes to read the summary. With the absence of the Lord Chief Justice, and none of the parties were there as well. And again, Coppelman's testimony was accepted by the court, though they criticized him. They accepted basically that he was in a mental state that made it oppressive to what there are two parts to why he, why Baratso decided it would be oppressive to extradite him and why she barred the extradition and discharged him even though he's still in prison. And that was because of his mental state and because of the conditions of the prisons. So the High Court saw that the conditions of the prison were no longer an element in that decision because the United States had given these assurances that he won't be put in special administrative measures or in any other harsh condition. Therefore, Baratso's judgment no longer stands. There were two pillars to it. They've knocked down one. Her judgment collapses. The High Court is sending this case back to that court, to the lower court, with the instructions not to re-litigate this, but to send it on to the cabinet, grab the Secretary of State for justice, and he will decide whether to send Assange to the United States or not. That will probably be stopped for the time being by a request, an application to the UK Supreme Court by Julian Assange's lawyers. The High Court rejected the arguments by Assange's lawyers that the US assurances cannot be trusted. And this is part of the language that the High Court used in shooting down that Assange lawyers argument that these assurances cannot be trusted. I quote, general statements of opinion calling into question the good faith of the USA from those who establish no relevant expertise to give such an opinion are of no more value than a journalistic opinion called from an internet search. The court has considered all the material. The court rejected that assurances should not be omitted because in our view, a court hearing, an extradition case, whether at first instance or on appeal, has the power to receive and consider assurances, whether they are offered by a requesting state. This was another part of the US argument to reject the assurances that they came after the extradition hearing and after the judgment was made. Now the High Court did cite law to say that you could put this in. Afterward, the issue to me is not whether it was too late or not, although that is certainly debatable. And this law maybe on both sides of that. But the issue is that the High Court seized these assurances as being solemn and being 100% trustworthy. They accepted what James Lewis said in the courtroom in late October at the High Court that the US has never lied, has never betrayed any of their promises ever, which raised quite a few eyebrows around the world. I can say that very much. That is the story. The story is not the mental health issue. As I said, they accept the acceptance of compliments testimony, that he has Asperger's, he's on the syndrome, on the spectrum. This is the case came down to the High Court says the assurances can be believed so he's not going to commit suicide, nothing to worry about here nothing to see the guys got to be sent to the US to face what charges of espionage espionage for obtaining and publishing state secrets which journalists do on a regular basis but Assange did it in a way that was not done before in volume in quality and the amount of raw material that was dumped and made available to the public we are considered the enemies because in a classic classic espionage case. A spy gives state secrets to an enemy. Well Assange gave these state secrets to the public as the right to know, and we are now I guess considered the enemy by the US and British governments, because he's being charged with espionage and right now it does not look very good. There was some very strong reactions, WikiLeaks editor in chief Christian happens and said Julian's life is once more under great threat. And so was the right of journalists to publish material that governments of corporations find inconvenient Stella Morris, called the high court decision today a grave miscarriage of justice. John Pilger, high court has ruled that Assange can be extradited to the US. He quotes Stella Morris how can it be fair how can it be right, how can it be possible to extradite Julian to the very country which plotted to kill him. A fact that was nowhere to be found in the 27 page ruling today again not a whisper of the CIA. And so Pilger concludes this tweet by saying in his own words, mark this day as fascism casts off its disguises. British journalist Peter Hitchens said the British government must not permit the extradition of Julian Assange to the USA. The case is clearly political and to surrender him to the US penal system would be to declare ourselves a vassal state of the USA not as a sovereign because Johnson, Boris Johnson surely knows this in fact Johnson had spoken in Parliament, a year or so, in which he admitted that it was an imbalanced extradition process between Britain and the United States that US gets about gets just about everybody they asked for Britain hardly gets anyone it's not a fair system Johnson knows I think that's what Hitchens was referring to and again, this was the day was also human rights day. The concluding day of the US Democracy Summit. It was the day in which two journalists in Stockholm were given the Nobel Prize, and the Nobel Prize was set up by Alfred Nobel as an anti militarist and peace prize. That's why it's called that it came out of a period where there was a movement with the Hague conferences to try to literally outlaw war war they thought that that couldn't be done. That was the ideal, and Alfred Nobel put this prize together. And in fact, it's the exact opposite. We've seen that in the past with Kissinger getting the award for example but today Julian Assange instead of being in Stockholm to receive that Nobel Prize in the spirit of Alfred Nobel, and in the spirit of what journalism is about. He's languishing again in Belmoush prison, now having been ordered again to be extradited by the high court. It's up to the Secretary of State unless the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom can stop them. It's a very good day for Julian Assange, for his partner, for his family and friends, and for the rest of us, particularly us in the media, who see what a threat this really is. The USA and Britain are acting in a way that no one can deny is the way a totalitarian state reacts to its critics in the media. In terms of its report from London on the case today on the High Court's decision, pointed out that this is troubling for the First Amendment, they can't deny that. And also that if he's extradited to the US, it will be a constitutional battle of enormous proportions, because if he goes to Alexandria, Virginia, and he's put on trial inside the US where the First Amendment operates even though then Secretary of State, John Payor, said the First Amendment wouldn't apply to Assange, even though the Esprit d'Arche Act does apply to him, even though he was not an American, not in the US. This will be a huge battle if he goes to Virginia, if he goes to the Supreme Court. We had James Goodall the other day on CM live, he was the New York Times lawyer and depending on papers case and he said that the Supreme Court of that era would have sided with Assange. We're in a different era now. We're in the era of Western governments that still pretend their democracies, that they're spreading democracy around the world, and they have summits in order to bolster that idea. If it's true, would they need to continue reminding people that they are Democrats, small D, that they are spreading democracy around the world. No, they would not. And instead, on that day on this awful day for journalism for Julian Assange, he's lost. We wait for the appeal application to the UK Supreme Court, but this was not the moment that his supporters were waiting for. And it's something we must think very deeply about the consequences for a system that it pretends to be democratic. We're not there. We will certainly be keeping very close attention to this case we have an article up today on today's hearing but the link to the 27 page ruling that you could read yourself we will be having commentaries and analysis over the coming days we're planning a to discuss this in detail. And until that happens in a couple of days I'm signing off for a consortium news on this dark day this is Joe Laurier. Talk to you soon.