The Strange Case of Julian Assange

30 Oct

ON THE 19th AUGUST, outside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, I watched several hundred people stand for hours in a show of solidarity with a man who refuses to face rape charges. Julian Assange, the head of Wikileaks, emerged onto the balcony of the embassy that has granted him political asylum, and gave a brief speech, to the loud approbation of a crowd encircled by the police that want to arrest him.

To his defenders, he is a martyr for free speech and an opponent of secret government – a man who leads an organization that has stunned the world with details of the cynical deals made between America and many other nations, especially in South America and the Middle East. But in Sweden, Assange is under suspicion of rape and wanted for a final interview before being charged. In many people’s eyes, he’s been set up, and they suspect that extradition to Sweden would result in a swift extradition to the United States, where it is believed he might face execution.

The Swedish police first interviewed Assange in August 2010, concerning allegations of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one of rape, after which he came to the UK. Assange has not actually been formally charged, as many people have pointed out – but this is not quite as simple as it sounds. In Sweden, the formal charge is only made after the prosecuting evidence has been gathered, unlike in the UK where a defendant is charged and then investigated. In his legal fight against extradition in the English courts, Assange tried to argue that the offences he’s been accused of are not offences under English law, but the High Court rejected that claim. In their final judgment, they also ruled that, though he has not been charged, “criminal proceedings have commenced against Mr Assange”.

Indeed, it would not be possible for Sweden to extradite Assange merely for questioning. The Extradition Act states that the extradition warrant “is issued with a view to [the defendant’s] arrest and extradition … for the purpose of being prosecuted for the offence.” Assange is wanted in Sweden for a second interview, following which he would be charged. And according to Swedish law, his trial would have to commence not more than two weeks afterwards.

It has been argued, though, that Sweden ought to interview Assange in London, to assuage the doubts of those concerned about his possible extradition to the US. But it’s not at all clear of what benefit this would be to the Swedish authorities, since they will formally charge him following this second interview – and the charges can only be faced in Sweden. Assange has already shown his unwillingness to go to Sweden, and is unlikely to forego his asylum to do so when he has been charged. Sweden has refused to guarantee that he would not be extradited to the US, claiming that they can only judge the validity of an extradition warrant when they receive it – and the US can only make the request when Assange is in Sweden.

Despite this, Assange would actually be slightly less at risk of extradition to the United States in Sweden than in the UK. Both countries are prohibited by the European Convention of Human Rights from extraditing someone to a country where they would face charges of a capital offence, or prison conditions so bad they amount to torture – as they arguably do for Bradley Manning, the corporal who leaked many of the US government documents to Wikileaks. But extradition from Sweden would also require the additional consent of the UK, where Assange enjoys a high level of popular support. Many American politicians and media pundits have made bloodthirsty remarks, and suggested a trial for treason or espionage (which faces the death penalty), but the European Convention clearly makes Assange’s extradition illegal under such inhumane circumstances.

Having exhausted all his options in the lower courts, the Supreme Court of the UK also upheld his extradition warrant, after which Assange skipped bail. He was granted political asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy, itself an issue of dubious legality, since the 1951 Refugee Convention allows asylum only for those with a “well-founded fear of being persecuted”. This definition of ‘persecution’ does not normally include the prosecution of a person under laws enacted by a democratically elected parliament, after the person has been allowed to challenge the case multiple times in the courts. Nonetheless, even if he is never extradited, Assange will still be liable for arrest in the UK for breaching his bail terms.

On 16th August, Assange was granted asylum by the Embassy of Ecuador, but the UK refused to grant him safe passage out of the country. The Foreign Office then made a very clumsy move, and sent a letter to the Ecuadorean ambassador that ‘reminded’ him of the powers the Foreign Secretary has to revoke an embassy’s diplomatic status.  These powers do exist, but they are limited and would cause a major diplomatic headache, as well as requiring significant justification in international law under the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. It is very unlikely that the UK would risk setting a precedent for the entry by the police of other countries into its embassies, merely in order to arrest a man suspected of sexual assault.

The result is a stalemate. Assange could potentially remain in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for years, or even for the remainder of his life, acting as a continual embarrassment to the UK, the US, and Sweden. What is certain is that if he steps outside the embassy doors, he will be immediately arrested and deported to Sweden. Whether or not the charges against him are true, we may never know. They can only be proved in a court of law, and it is quite possible that Assange will never enter one again in his life.

~Christopher Hyland

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Girls Education and the Taliban

29 Oct

IN MAY LAST YEAR, when Osama bin Laden was discovered – not pathetically skulking, as was predicted, in some tenebrous cave on the Afghan border, but ensconced in a luxury compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy – there commenced much collective scratching of official heads. How, it was asked, could the world’s most wanted man have lived for so long and so comfortably under the noses of the Pakistani security forces? Pakistan, a beneficiary of $4 billion a year in military and financial assistance from the United States, is not always the most dependable ally. The shooting of Malala Yousafzai, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, in an area purportedly under firm government control, is only the lowest point in a story replete with shame and cynicism.

Malala Yousafzai became famous inside and outside Pakistan in 2009, at the age of 11, when she wrote a blog for the BBC detailing the depravities of life under Taliban rule. In 2007, Taliban militants had begun the take-over of her home in Swat Valley, the verdant tourist destination near the disputed Durand Line that separates Afghanistan and Pakistan. (The Durand Line, like so many other violent geopolitical demarcations, including the one that created Pakistan from India, was drawn on a map by an official of the British Empire.) The Taliban forbade girls’ education, destroyed hundreds of schools, and attacked teachers and pupils (as well as its usual attacks on music, tolerance and culture). Her handwritten notes were smuggled to a BBC reporter who then posted them on the BBC Urdu website. The Pakistani military eventually fought back against the Taliban, but the degree of control they now claim over the area has been belied by Yousafzai’s shooting.

“It seems that it is only when dozens of schools have been destroyed and hundreds others closed down”, she wrote in January 2009, “that the army thinks about protecting them. Had they conducted their operations here properly, this situation would not have arisen.” Her criticisms of the Taliban and the Pakistani government’s actions were serialized in newspapers, and when the Taliban had been driven out of Swat, she became an activist for female education, and a national political figure. She was awarded Pakistan’s first National Youth Peace Prize by the then Prime Minister, Yousa Raza Gilani (who, in April this year, was controversially removed from office by the Supreme Court), and was also nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize.

At one point, Yousafzai wrote on her blog, “O God bring peace to Swat and if not then bring either the US or China here [sic]”. And therein, indeed, lies part of the problem: the US provides $4.3 billion in military and financial aid to Pakistan. In return, the elite that rules the country focuses popular anger towards the ‘sovereignty violations’ caused by the use of unmanned US drones, rather than towards the abuses committed by the Taliban and related fundamentalist groups, with which the security forces often collude. (In fact, the drone strikes are entirely legal under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, since the Pakistani government, despite its repeated protestations of surprise and offence, authorizes them all beforehand.) For as long as the US continues to bankroll the corrupt military and political elites of Pakistan, it will be funding its own enemies, and the enemies also of the large number of people in Pakistan who affirm the basic rights that ought to inhere in the word “human”. Manufactured offence, such as that caused by the film, ‘The Innocence of the Muslims’, a deranged piece of piffle from an independent filmmaker, often occludes the fact that being a Muslim in the Middle East does not axiomatically make a person opposed to American values – or, indeed, interventions.

Although the Prime Minister, Raja Pervez Ashraf, has called Yousafzai “our daughter”, the Pakistani parliament has once again rejected a motion for a military operation against terrorist forces in North Waziristan. Many politicians have been too afraid to condemn the Taliban attack on Yousafzai, and it is likely that some support it. Nonetheless, the shooting of Yousafzai, as she rode the bus home from an exam, has prompted popular outrage across Pakistan. Only 29% of girls are educated in Pakistan, and violence and serfdom are often the only things the future promises for the rest, but large groups of women and – crucially – men, have been prepared to rally and protest in Malala Yousafzai’s name and against the Taliban. Many also offered to donate blood, before she was transferred to the UK for medical treatment. And fifty Islamic clerics promulgated a fatwa against the Taliban gunmen (which, one can’t help feeling, while to be applauded under the circumstances, rather misses the point in its own way).

Consider, finally, the Taliban’s typically arrogant attempt at explanation and self-exculpation: “We did not attack her for raising a voice for education. We targeted her for opposing the mujahideen and their war,” said a Taliban spokesman. Given that their ‘war’ involved, amongst other things, burning down and destroying a total of 401 girls’ schools in Swat Valley, assaulting and killing teachers, and throwing acid in the faces of schoolchildren, this explanation doesn’t suffice on the factual level, let alone the moral. But we might choose to take hope from the fact that the Taliban feels the need to justify itself in the first place. And from the fact that, while the government and the politicians of Pakistan continue to abase themselves, many brave men and women – and children – are prepared to risk their lives for the right to an education, and the freedom that that must be made to entail.

~Christopher Hyland

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The End of the Hungarian Republic

21 Aug

HUNGARY, AN EU STATE and a member of NATO, is at the centre of a storm of criticism over its new constitution, which has been in force since January 1, 2012. Hungary was already censured in 2011 by civil liberties organizations because of a media law passed by Fidesz, the ruling party. It forced journalists to give up sources and allowed the newly established Media Council, which was composed of five members of Fidesz, to regulate press content and the arts in the name of “balance”. Its term was nine years: in the likely event that Fidesz lost an election, the party would still have control over the media. Writers and directors, such as the acclaimed Robert Alfoldi, were denounced in Parliament as “anti-Hungarian”. The Council was given the power to impose fines of up to €700,000 for broadcast outlets and up to €90,000 for newspapers and websites. Worse, the fines were only challengeable in court after they had been paid: in such a situation, self-censorship becomes the norm. There was little comment from the EU in 2011 about the law, but Hungary’s Constitutional Court finally found against it in December – less than three weeks later, a new constitution was promulgated, and the court’s function as constitutional arbiter effectively abolished. Judges across the country have been forcibly retired, their replacements to be nominated by the government. The media law is still in place.

The old constitution allowed private members bills – normally used by backbenchers to present their own proposals, and rarely successful – to be voted on without the necessity for multiple readings or consultation with opposition parties. Government bills, as in any democracy, were analyzed far more thoroughly by the parliament. The Fidesz government therefore presented most government bills as private members bills. The new constitution itself passed as a private member’s bill. But this piece of chicanery perhaps began to prove embarrassing for the government: the new rules allow a government bill to go from its first proposal to its final vote without a debate, so long as a two-thirds majority agrees beforehand. Fidesz has a majority of over two-thirds.

The EU, previously more concerned with the lugubrious state of the Hungarian economy and the government’s banking reforms, is slowly beginning to focus on what it tenderly calls the “issue of democracy”. On February 17, European Union MPs passed a resolution that details their “serious concern” about the rule of law in Hungary, as well as the attacks on the independence of the judiciary and press freedom. Several Hungarian MEPs voted to condemn their own government; a splenetic response resulted from the capital. “There is a very precise term for this in the Hungarian language: in a moral and political sense what they did is treason,” said Zsolt Semjen, the Deputy Prime Minister, in a television interview.

Even Hungary’s official name has been changed. It used to be ‘the Hungarian Republic’. Now, the last word has been excised. The country is still formally a republic – and has been since 1918, after the First World War broke the Austro-Hungarian monarchy apart – but names do matter. Many in Hungary feel it’s a worrying echo of the febrile dreams some harbor of a “Greater Hungary”, when King and God and Country dominated Hungary’s neighbours. When Hungary had the EU Presidency in 2011 – one of the reasons it wasn’t pressed as hard as it normally would have been by the EU – it laid down a new carpet in the headquarters of the European Council. This lavish gift featured a map of Europe in 1848, when Hungary was much larger and its minatory shadow extended over much of the heart of the continent. Despite the claims of one flustered MEP, this act didn’t in itself represent the government’s “intention to overcome the Treaty of Trianon”, the post-WW1 peace treaty that settled Hungary’s borders, but it was easy for some states to see it as a metaphor: a fear the new constitution exacerbates.

The preamble to the constitution references “the Holy Crown of Hungary”, as well as God and the fatherland, and declares that national sovereignty resides in the “ethnic Hungarians” – that is, in none of the other races that have lived in Hungary for hundreds of years. Not Roma, who are frequently subjected to physical attacks, not Jews, not immigrants, but the “ethnic Hungarians” – who are, according to the Constitution, all Christians. There are also many “ethnic Hungarians” in countries close to Hungary, such as Slovakia, which raised concerns in 2011 over a Hungarian citizenship law that makes it easy for ethnic Hungarians abroad to get a Hungarian passport. The implication is that if the sovereignty of Hungary resides in ethnic Hungarians, then wherever there are ethnic Hungarians there is Hungarian sovereignty – even if that should include parts of other countries. As Article D of the new Constitution puts it, vaguely, Hungary “shall bear responsibility for the fate of Hungarians living outside its borders”. The froideur between Hungary and its neighbours is now palpable.

100,000 people protested outside the Parliament on January 1, and Fidesz has poll ratings of only 18 per cent. But it’s still the largest party. In any case, the government has redrawn electoral districts to enable it to stay in power. Some people went on hunger strike in December, but most do what they are told, afraid of losing their jobs. Among those who have spoken out against the government is George Konrad, the dissident, essayist and novelist who took part in the 1956 Uprising against Communist rule and was a staunch foe of the miserable regime that followed the Soviet invasion. Konrad recently said his homeland is “beginning to resemble the post-Soviet dictatorships of Central Asia”. Hungary is “consumed by a civil cold war”, and the new constitution “has put an end to the Republic of Hungary and pluralistic democracy, and assuming it remains in force, ensures the rule of the current administration for a long time to come.”

And so, at the end of this litany of dismal facts, comes the question: where is the outrage? Where are the reports in Britain? There have been a few, such as George Szirtes and Nick Cohen and organisations such as Index on Censorship, who have protested against Fideszc, but the situation in Hungary has failed to permeate the media or the public at large. One party taking control of public media; the humourless and illiterate Party apparatchik telling writers what to write; the subversion of the rule of law… It’s hardly anything new to Europe, but this species of nonsense was supposed to have been put down in 1989 (ignoring, as many people do, the depravities Europe allowed to occur in the Balkans for nearly a decade). The extreme nationalism and irredentist fever-dreams of Fidesz ought to raise more eyebrows. The mainland press is covering this better than the British press, but the EU as a body is responding weakly. Hungary is due to begin talks with the EU over a large loan, but the EU seems strangely reluctant to tie Hungarian policy changes to approval of the loan. It was always part of the EU “mission” that it would use the possibility of membership, and the economic benefits that brings to states, as “soft power” to promote the spread of democracy to its neighbours. But it seems to have failed to imagine a situation where a member state itself started to go rogue, and the EU couldn’t afford not to give it economic aid.

~Christopher Hyland

This article appeared in an edited form in February’s edition of Pi, UCL’s student newspaper. It is therefore, I think, quite out of date now, but I hope it prompts a few more people to look at what’s happening in Hungary with slightly clearer eyes. I may have slightly over-emphasised the threat to Hungary’s neighbours, which I think are mostly rhetorical. It is the situation inside Hungary that ought to alarm us. I shall be posting more on this topic in the future, and hope to report from Hungary as soon as I’m done with my pesky time-consuming degree.

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Darwin Day

12 Feb

Perhaps my favourite example of the revolution in intellectual thought that was to occur with the publication, in 1859, of On the Origin of Species is to be found in George Henry Lewe’s altogether marvelous Biographical History of Philosophy. Lewes (who was the lover of George Elliot, and whose biography of Goethe has yet to surpassed) published his History in 1846. Consider, if you will, in a passage bemoaning the interference of sacerdotal and reactionary forces in the pursuit of scientific and philosophic knowledge, the following irritated tale: “and only recently, Mr. Crosse’s celebrated experiments, on the production of insects by means of electricity, were endeavoured to be put down by the assertion that they ‘led to atheism’”.

Isn’t that superb? The production of insects by means of electricity… Ironically, or perhaps I mean cynically, the proponents of unreason would nowadays adduce such a ‘discovery’ for theism rather than its antithesis, and with it would loudly and correctly toll the knell of death for the modern synthesis of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian natural selection. After Origins, Crosse’s so-called experiments were rendered farcical, and a new paradigm (for once one can use the word properly) was revealed. But instituted religion continued to meddle in, and to stultify, scientific, especially biological, progress; and it now faced a far graver threat to the divine theory of biogenesis, in evolution by means of natural selection, than it had ever surmounted in the soon-forgotten Mr. Crosse and his fantastic electrical progeny.

~ Christopher Hyland

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The Right to Offend

4 Feb

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (one of only three accomplishments that the great Enlightenment figure wished engraved on his epitaph), wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia the following limpid statement of an elementary principle: “Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature.” Freedom of speech is the trunk of the tree of liberty (and, as Tom Bingham sedulously showed in his book, The Rule of Law, the roots of the constitutional precept from which he took his title).

Almost everybody professes to agree with the above. They are, however, apt to ruefully declare that the principle is sometimes taken “too far”. In January, UCL Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society (UCLASH) advertised one of its weekly socials using a cartoon that depicts Jesus and Muhammad propped up at the bar, pints of beer in front of them. UCL Union, following several demands that cited the gravamen of religious offence, ordered that the image be removed from the advertisement. I suspect that many people reading this don’t see any importance in the Union’s act and perhaps agree with the asseveration of a representative of UCL Ahmadiyya Muslim Students Association: “freedom to insult is the very worst aspect of freedom of expression”.

But this is quite untrue. Freedom to insult is not an unfortunate concomitant, but the very definition, of freedom of expression. A free mind does not defend only the speech it likes; it defends most that speech which it finds most offensive. One should engage in this task, not masochistically, but because one is aware that any person or group may construe one’s own critical speech as ‘offensive’ or ‘hateful’ or ‘insulting’, whether it is intended to be or not. It is, furthermore, good for one’s values and sacred ideas to be regularly assaulted, the dust rudely blown from the too-comfortable furniture of the mind. (That is, or used to be, the function of universities.) We are then required to reflect on why we believe what we do; to offer a counter-argument; allow it to be treated to a counter-counter argument; and so on. We must protect the right to express contrary views, and combat them with criticism, not coercion, or else condemn ourselves to mumbling the emollient, opinionless, bipartisan, decaffeinated patois of pithy platitudes and sententious drivel, in which most of our moral ‘leaders’, politicians and press are already too fluent.

And we may agree that a right of freedom of speech needn’t – a very different word from “shouldn’t” – be exercised all the time. But unless we are mutes it will be exercised periodically. And as soon as one is told that it oughtn’t to be, and that one’s habit, generally, to be inoffensive, is not a politeness but an obligation, the hour has come to cease with whispers. Members of UCLASH were not, as has been claimed, reposting the cartoon to reoffend, but rather to loudly reaffirm the truth of an old insight (one often in need of reaffirmation), in the face of instituted censorship: namely, that if the freedom to speak means anything at all, it means the freedom to say things that people do not like.

Moreover, the prohibition on portrayals of Muhammad, and on the drinking of alcohol, is an Islamic one (and of contested authority in the hadith). The UCL Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society is not, one would presume, an Islamic organization. Nor, according to their constitution, is the Student Union of England’s first secular university. Why, then, did UCLU Union involve itself in the knotty issue of Islamic hermeneutics, and decide that non-Muslim students must be subject to the same constraints that Muslim students willingly impose on themselves? One doesn’t, after all, get oneself circumcised just because one’s neighbour happens to be Jewish.

One would also, of course, defend the right of Muslims not to depict their Prophet drinking alcohol, were that right ever to be attacked. But one would hope for at least some element of reciprocity: that Muslims will defend the rights of unbelievers to do as they see fit according to their own consciences. And, indeed, a few did so, offended but believing in the right to offend. It was not for UCL Union to presume that those individual Muslims who demanded censorship represented the views of all Muslims, and nor, more importantly, would it be for the Union to censor even had that been the case. To always eschew offence is to commit the life of the mind to suicide.

The function of art, after all, is to humanise the alien: a necessarily taboo process. By doing so, we tilt the human condition on its axis, around which it really revolves. What is the point of a freedom to mock political ideologies and governments, and religious ones, like Catholicism and Judaism, if one can’t extend the same treatment to Islam? A partial freedom to speak out is no freedom to speak at all.

~Christopher Hyland

This article appears in an edited form in February’s edition of Pi, UCL’s student newspaper.

It was written before the events at LSE and Queen Mary’s, and the censorship of Rhys Morgan by his school. Please consider going along to the Rally to Defend Free Expression, hosted by Maryam Namazie of One Law for All, on Saturday 11th February.

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About, or ‘The Devil’s Party’

2 Feb

I am currently an undergraduate at University College, London. I’m interested in foreign affairs, politics, and literature.

The title, ‘Devil’s Advocado’, is perhaps a confusing choice of nom de plume, but I don’t mean by it to express a desire for a bipartisan, healing, consensual, decaffeinated political patois, in which no side is taken and no opinion remarkable, or remarkable upon. I am partisan: I care for rational, evidence-based analysis, and try to oppose the dreary cliches and ideological ukases of politicians, religious figures, and soi-disant intellectuals.

I am of the Devil’s party, as it were: the party of the Enlightenment; and this humble weblog shall attempt to provide for readers who feel themselves part of the same fraternity. We don’t have mottos — but, if we did, one might just be Non serviam.

If you would like me to write for you, please do contact me. I am currently a student, but very soon I shall be — and I find I must emphasise this – poor and jobless. Please direct your offers of jobs and inexplicably large sums of money thither:

christopher.hyland.10 AT ucl.ac.uk

~ Christopher Hyland

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