I do think that the decision is important and surprising, a very significant victory for Julian Assange. I think the press freedom implications are m… - Jameel Jaffer
" "I do think that the decision is important and surprising, a very significant victory for Julian Assange. I think the press freedom implications are more complicated. The judge — while ultimately holding that Assange can’t be extradited to the United States on the basis of his mental health and the conditions under which he would be held if he were extradited here, the judge largely endorses the U.S. prosecution theory. And that theory is based on an indictment that sweeps very, very broadly, that basically the indictment is an effort to hold Assange criminally responsible for acts that journalists engage in all the time. And it doesn’t matter whether Assange himself is properly characterized as a journalist. That may be an important debate, but legally it’s completely irrelevant.
English
Collect this quote
About Jameel Jaffer
Jameel Jaffer is a human rights and civil liberties attorney and the inaugural director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which was created to defend the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age. Jaffer is particularly notable for the role he played in litigating Freedom of Information Act requests that led to the release of documents concerning the torture of prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and in CIA black sites.
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Jameel Jaffer
And the press freedom fear here is that the prosecution of Assange, and even the indictment itself, will deter journalism that is important and necessary and that should be regarded as protected by the First Amendment. And I think that this ruling is, again, a victory for Assange, but insofar as it’s an endorsement of the U.S.’s prosecution theory and of the underlying indictment, I think that that indictment is going to continue to cast a kind of shadow over investigative journalism.
Our request was relatively broad because we don’t think the public can meaningfully evaluate the lawfulness of the strike that killed al-Aulaqi and Samir Khan—or the strike that killed 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi two weeks later—without access to the factual basis the government relied on to justify the strikes. We also believe that the public is entitled to records relating to civilian casualties.... Once the Second Circuit remands our case to the district court, the ACLU will almost certainly be litigating not only over the other OLC memos but over this kind of factual information as well.
PREMIUM FEATURE
Advanced Search Filters
Filter search results by source, date, and more with our premium search tools.
Loading...