Joe Biden said on Wednesday that he is considering a request from Australia to drop the decade-long US push to prosecute the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing a trove of American classified documents.
Joe Biden said on Wednesday that he is considering a request from Australia to drop the decade-long US push to prosecute the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing a trove of American classified documents.
I have never understood under what justification the US is demanding Assange is extradited to them and charged with espionage. He is not American, doesn’t live in the US and owes no allegiance to the US. Does the US claim some kind of universal jurisdiction in this case?
Every country has “universal” jurisdiction in the sense that they can request the extradition of any foreign individual for any reason.
It’s then up to the rest of the world whether to grant that, or more specifically whatever country the individual happens to be in.
Extradition exists because otherwise crimes commited remotely across borders would be even more rampant than they already are, and it is in the interest of governments to allow other governments to prosecute individuals that commit particularly egregious crimes across a border, or escape across a border.
Whether Assange is one of those is debatable, but the US has a lot of weight to throw around and Wikileaks offended the government specifically. So here we are.
Isn’t there some big nuclear submarine deal going on right now between America and Australia?
In the name of national security, who cares about the rights of a few foreigners living on foreign (allied) soil? This isn’t a coincidence, this is literally a core component of US foreign policy.