The 2020 extradition hearing was the first substantive proceeding in the United States’ attempt to remove Julian Assange from Britain. John Kiriakou described it on its second day, from Washington, to a Dutch interviewer who had spent the previous day outside the court.
The schedule, and why he thought it helped
Kiriakou treated the length of the proceeding as the first significant fact. “This is a long process — it’s a very long process. Actually it’s going to stretch into July by all accounts, and there’s going to be a break of at least a month in the midst of this thing at the request of the American prosecutors, just because they say they can’t remain in London for such a long stretch.”[1] He found the excuse “very odd.”[2]
The length itself, though, he read as favourable: it would give the defence “ample opportunity to get a lot of facts into the record about the American prison system that otherwise would have been overlooked or ignored.”[2]
The fact he ranked first was solitary confinement — the UN special rapporteur on torture’s position that the American practice meets the United Nations definition of torture, and the existence of several precedents in British jurisprudence in which courts have refused to extradite prisoners to the United States because they would be subjected to it.[3]
The courtroom
Kiriakou was not inside. He holds no press card, so he could not take a journalist’s seat, and spent the day outside with the protesters — some British, a Norwegian, a Dutchman, and then the French, whom he calls the yellow vests and “the heroes of the day.” They arrived in the morning and did not stop singing and banging the fences until the court recessed, audible from inside.[4][5]
What he heard from inside came from a member of the European Parliament observing the case, who found no seat had been reserved for her, queued like everyone else, was directed to an empty second courtroom and stayed there as it filled around her.[5][6]
Her account of the proceedings was that the audio system was off and the microphones were not working, so that even people in the room could not hear the judge — and Assange, seated behind a plastic wall, had trouble hearing his own case.[7]
Kiriakou said none of it would happen in an American court. The plexiglass shield is a British habit “unheard of in the United States”, and in the handful of American courtrooms he has sat in, the parties are close enough that “you didn’t even really need a microphone.”[7][8] His summary: “this doesn’t surprise me at all. It sounds like more of a circus sideshow than it does an actual legal hearing.”[8] Told that the word for it was amateurism, he agreed — “you’d think they would have tested the sound system first on a case like this.”[9]
The problem with winning
The worry Kiriakou raised unprompted was what a defence victory would actually deliver. Assange is an Australian citizen who had had his passport renewed within the previous year or so. If the judge refused the American request, Britain would have no reason to keep him: “he’s not a British citizen, he doesn’t have a right to remain in Britain.”[10]
Expelled to Australia, he would be within reach again: “the US will just ask the Australians to extradite him.” What Kiriakou wanted instead was an exit of Assange’s own choosing — “it would be so much better if he were allowed to leave for Russia, or if there were a country that would be willing to provide him with asylum, because I don’t think that he would be safe if he wins and he’s expelled to Australia.”[11][10]
Outside the courtroom, in Washington
Asked what was happening on the American side, Kiriakou described a week of daily demonstrations then under way: they began at the White House, moved to the Trump International Hotel, and continued a few blocks further to the Justice Department and the attorney general’s office, and would repeat every day that week to keep the pressure up.[12][13]
He knew all the speakers, and made a point of their affiliation: none identified as Democrats. They called themselves independents or Greens, “because they believe, like I do, that the Democratic Party is so similar to and consistent with the Republican Party that there’s really not much of a difference between the two.”[13][14]