Twelve years ago, on November 28, 2010, our five International Rank Press Body (The New York Times, The Guardian, MO12345LEMONDE, EL PAIS and DER SPIEGEL) were united to publish, in collaboration with Wikileaks, A series of revelations taken up by the media around the world.
More than 251,000 diplomatic telegrams emanating from the United States Department of State were made public during this “cablegate”, throwing light on several corruption cases, diplomatic scandals and spy operations on the scale of the planet.
As the New York Times then wrote, the disclosed documents retraced “the without eyeshadow in the way the government makes its most important decisions, those which have the greatest human and financial cost for the country. “Today, in 2022, this exceptional documentary source is still exploited by journalists as historians, who still find matter there for the publication of unpublished revelations.
endless judicial prosecution
For the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, this “cablegate” and several other “leaks” or leaks of sensitive documents have had extremely serious consequences. On April 12, 2019, Julian Assange, under an American arrest warrant, was apprehended in London. For three and a half years already, he has been detained on British soil, in a high security prison which normally houses terrorists or members of groups related to organized crime. He risks being extradited to the United States, where he faces a sentence of up to a hundred and seventy-five years of incarceration in a very high security prison.
Our group of editors and publication directors, who all had the opportunity to work with Julian Assange, deemed necessary to publicly criticize his attitude in 2011 when uncon censored versions of diplomatic telegrams were made public , and some of us remain concerned about the allegation appearing in the American indictment that he would have helped computer intrusion in a database classified “secret-defense”. But we are in solidarity today to express our great concern in the face of the endless legal proceedings that Julian Assange undergoes for having collected and published confidential and sensitive information.
The Obama-Biden administration, in power during Wikileaks publications in 2010, was careful not to assign Julian Assange to court, explaining that it would also have been necessary to continue many journalists from several media of wingspan. This position recognized the freedom of the press as crucial, whatever the unpleasant consequences.
But this vision of things has evolved under the mandate of Donald Trump: the Department of Justice is now based on a law dating back more than a century, the acting act of 1917. Designed during the First War Global to be able to assign potential spies in court, this federal law had never been used against journalists, media or diffusers. Such an indictment creates a dangerous precedent, threatens the freedom to inform and risks reducing the scope of the first amendment to the United States Constitution.
In a democracy, one of the fundamental missions of an independent press is to refer governments to their responsibilities.
Collecting and disseminating sensitive information constitutes the same essential part of the work of journalist on a daily basis, when this disclosure turns out to be of public interest. If this work is declared criminal, then not only the quality of the public debate but also our democracies will be considerably weakened.
Twelve years after the first publications related to “cablegate”, the time has come for the government of the United States to abandon its prosecution against Julian Assange for having published secret information.
publish is not a crime.