- wsws: UK High Court sides with US against Assange
Posted by sashimi
on August 12, 2021, 12:34 pm
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Thomas Scripps, 11 August 2021 (quote) The US was initially granted leave to appeal on grounds one, two and five, but denied three and four. At a preliminary hearing yesterday in front of Lord Justice Holroyde and Mrs Justice Farbey, that decision was overturned and grounds three and four were granted as well. Their decision confirms that the January 4 ruling against extradition was only a tactical pause in an ongoing pseudo-legal manhunt, which is again proceeding apace. Baraitser's original decision accepted every one of the prosecution's anti-democratic, factually unsustainable arguments except on the single point of Assange's mental health, leaving his fate hanging by a thread. Now the US is being given the opportunity to bulldoze this last remaining obstacle. As Assange's legal team argue in their Notice of Objection, none of the points made in the appeal by the US stand up to scrutiny. On ground one, the US lawyers "identified no errors of law in the approach taken by the District Judge" who applied the relevant "Turner test" in a manner consistent with the recent case of Lauri Love. On ground two, the court was under no obligation to prompt the US to provide assurances. On ground five, the new US "assurances" are nothing of the sort - they are conditional and have been given and broken in previous cases. Moreover, they have been introduced at such a late stage that they cannot be properly tested and contradict "the long-held and vitally important principle" that "parties to an extradition hearing should deploy all their evidence and raise all relevant issues at a single extradition hearing." Grounds three and four, Edward Fitzgerald QC maintained yesterday, representing Assange, are simply "unarguable." Claire Dobbin, representing the US, claimed that since defence expert medical witness Professor Kopelman had failed to record in a preliminary report that Assange was in a relationship with Stella Moris and had conceived two children with her - of direct relevance to the question of his mental health - he was guilty of misleading the court and his evidence ought to have been ruled inadmissible or given far less weight. But Baraitser did not fail to carry out, in the words of the prosecution's appeal, an "exacting analysis as to why Professor Kopelman" acted as he did. In fact, Fitzgerald explained, she "was fully aware of the criticism" and had "asked herself the right question" as to whether or not, in the context of his broader conduct, this called into question his impartiality. In her January 4 ruling, Baraitser stated that she "did not accept that Professor Kopelman failed in his duty to the court when he did not disclose Ms. Morris's relationship with Mr. Assange." She described Kopelman's omission as "an understandable human response to Mrs Moris's predicament," which had not led to her being misled. One does not need to accept that Baraitser came to this decision out of concern for legal principle to point out the bankruptcy of the US's arguments. As Fitzgerald stated at yesterday's hearing, "It is unarguable that there is a principle that any lapse, however understandable... renders the whole of an expert's evidence inadmissible... You have to take it in context and look at the overarching duty" of impartiality. In her arguments yesterday, Dobbin characteristically asked of Kopelman's "human response," "what does that even mean?" Fitzgerald later powerfully set out the extraordinary oppressive circumstances in which Kopelman made his decision: "There had been a surveillance organisation which was taking DNA from the [Assange's] baby's nappy, which was saying special attention should be placed on Stella Morris, which was examining measures to either kidnap or poison him [Assange]." (/quote) -- Cont'd at https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/08/11/assa-a11.html |
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