An important argument poorly made

This might be an important book about the trial of Julian Assange — but it is not a very good one.

Julian Assange’s treatment is worthy of examination - but not like this.

On 5 April 2010 at the Washington Press Club, Australian-born WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange presented a harrowing video that he called Collateral Murder, which showed the crew of a US combat helicopter in Baghdad apparently intentionally killing unarmed civilians, among them two journalists, and seriously injuring two children.

According to the author of the Trial of Julian Assange, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer, exposing this and other potential state crimes has been Assange’s only offence. Everything that has followed – from the rape case to his expulsion from asylum, his extended confinement in a maximum-security jail and US attempts to extradite him from the UK – has been a consequence of, and punishment for, his courageous investigative journalism.

In August 2010, Assange visited Stockholm with the idea that he might establish WikiLeaks as an officially recognised publisher, entitled to legal protection under the Swedish constitution. He had consensual sex with two local women, each of whom suspected that he had not used a condom.

The women eventually approached police to pressure Assange to take an HIV test and – against the wishes of both complainants – the police opened rape and sexual-harassment investigations against him. The details of Assange’s alleged behaviour were leaked to the press, along with – incredibly – the name of one of the alleged victims.

According to Melzer’s highly detailed account, neither woman ever intended to report a crime. Assange cancelled his planned departure from Sweden and put himself at the disposal of Swedish authorities, who ignored him until he flew back to London – and then accused him of trying to evade ­justice.

In the state of Virginia, a federal grand jury secretly began to investigate Assange for “espionage” – a cynical and dangerous term to describe investigative journalism – and Assange refused to return to Sweden unless he was given an assurance that he would not be extradited to the US.

In November 2010, Swedish police issued an international arrest warrant against him. He gave himself up to police in London and was eventually granted bail. In June 2012, when neither the British nor the Swedish government would agree to protect him from extradition, Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, where he remained for nearly seven years. In April 2019, after a change in government in Quito, the Metropolitan Police were invited into the embassy to arrest him and the US immediately demanded his extradition.

In the UK, Assange was sentenced to a hefty one year’s imprisonment for breach of the Bail Act and obliged to remain in maximum-security Belmarsh prison for the full term, even though he was a non-violent inmate entitled to a six-month discount for good behaviour. Incredibly, even since his sentence expired, he has been forced to stay in confinement in Belmarsh, accused of no crime on British soil, since he is considered a “flight risk” from potential extradition.

His rights to due process have been consistently violated and he has been treated as a terrorist rather than a journalist – even though, as Melzer points out, even the US government has been unable to identify anyone who has been physically harmed as a direct result of WikiLeaks’ revelations.

The Swedish authorities dropped the sexual assault charges while the US government ramped up the espionage accusations. Last month, UK Home Secretary Priti Patel approved Assange’s transfer to the US. ­Assange’s lawyers are preparing an appeal.

Melzer became involved in the case when he visited Assange in Belmarsh in 2019. He writes that even Assange’s legal team was surprised that he intended to describe the treatment of their client as torture, and the lawyers were concerned that the accusation would not be taken seriously.

But Melzer makes a strong claim for Assange having been psychologically tortured, and an attractive argument that Assange’s case is relevant to his mandate since WikiLeaks has published evidence of state-sanctioned war crimes, including torture, “yet it is Assange who is prosecuted, whereas the torturers and other war criminals enjoy complete impunity”. (Melzer is an enthusiastic utiliser of the qualified absolute.) Moreover, unlike its adversaries in the US intelligence services, WikiLeaks never obtains its information through torture.

This might be an important book, but it is not a very good one. Melzer veers alarmingly between past and present tenses. Many of his sentences are awkward and overlong. He can be repetitive, didactic and indignant, and perhaps overly concerned to emphasise the authority and integrity of the role of the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. He sometimes exaggerates. When he writes that four out of five members of a UN working group agreed that Assange’s confinement in the embassy amounted to arbitrary detention, he describes it as “the unanimity of the majority” – which is grammatical nonsense.

I checked only one fact and it turned out to be wrong. Melzer writes that the day Ecuador formally approved Assange’s asylum request, “BBC reporter Thom Phipps recommended via Twitter that the Metropolitan Police ‘drag Assange out of the embassy and shoot him in the back of the head in the middle of Trafalgar Square’”. If this does not sound like the language of a BBC journalist, it is because Phipps is a comedy writer.

Melzer rarely shies from the obvious. After a visit to Assange in jail, Melzer buys a pizza from a nearby branch of Domino’s. “There were only a few hundred yards between Belmarsh and Domino’s,” he writes, “and yet the prison walls separated two fundamentally different worlds”.

Some of the book’s deficiencies probably are not Melzer’s fault. He used a German ghostwriter, Oliver Kobold, and if you are going to create a book for English-language markets you should probably partner with an author whose first language is English.

In the end, this book’s lack of refinement detracts from its arguments – which is a pity, because those arguments need to be heard.

The Trial of Julian Assange

By Nils Melzer
Bloomsbury, Nonfiction
368pp, $29.99