Dunn family urge UK not to extradite Assange to the US
THE family of Harry Dunn has called for Julian Assange not to be extradited as long as the US refuses to send the suspect in the teenager’s death back to the UK.
The 19-year-old’s parents have said they believe any further extradition requests by the US should be refused after Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, rejected the return of Anne Sacoolas, the woman involved in their son’s death, last month.
Radd Seiger, their spokesman, said the foreign affairs committee had accepted their request for an inquiry into the extradition, and to the diplomatic immunity granted to Mrs Sacoolas.
The Wikileaks founder’s extradition hearing starts in London today. Assange, 48, is being held in Belmarsh Prison in south-east London and is wanted in the US to face 18 charges over the publication of US cables a decade ago. If found guilty he could face a 175-year prison sentence.
Harry Dunn was killed when his motorbike crashed into a car driven by Mrs Sacoolas outside a US military base in Northamptonshire on Aug 27 last year. The 42-year-old wife of an intelligence official based at RAF Croughton, was granted diplomatic immunity and allowed to return to her home country.
She was later charged with causing Mr Dunn’s death by dangerous driving.
The Julian Assange saga is due to reach some sort of conclusion soon, when a request from the US government to extradite him on charges of publishing classified documents is heard at Woolwich Crown Court from today. The Wikileaks founder was arraigned almost 10 years ago under a European Arrest Warrant issued by Sweden alleging rape and three sexual assaults. Rather than surrender himself to the British police, he sought sanctuary in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for eight years.
Mr Assange and his followers said the warrant was a ruse to get him into custody, whereupon he would be sought by America over leaking cables and other diplomatic papers connected to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Sweden has now dropped the charges against him, yet he still faces removal to the US, which suggests that his suspicions were well-founded. However, the Swedes say they only discontinued the case because the memories of witnesses had faded and they still regarded the evidence as credible and reliable. Assange has always denied the charges.
His supporters detect “dark forces” at work to mete out punishment for the role Wikileaks played in exposing American abuses during the conflicts. When Assange was trying to evade the charges against him in Sweden he was placing himself above a law that applied to everyone else. But now that these have been dropped, is he any different to a journalist publishing secret documents that exposed state shortcomings and wrongdoing?
The issue is how he came by the documents. The US alleges he conspired with Chelsea Manning, then a US intelligence analyst, to hack into a secret Pentagon network to access classified material. Were a journalist to do that in Britain it would be illegal, though a public interest defence could be mounted. This case will raise questions over the balance of power in the 2003 Extradition Treaty between the UK and the US. The family of Harry Dunn, killed in a collision with a car allegedly driven by Anne Sacoolas, an American claiming diplomatic immunity to avoid extradition, are angry at what they see as the lack of reciprocity.
The PM has conceded that elements of the extradition relationship between Britain and the US are “unbalanced”, although he has insisted the question of diplomatic immunity is separate. The country may not see it that way if Assange is extradited, yet the Dunn family receive no justice.