nuclear-news

Fighting for More Evidence of Assange’s Political Prosecution

Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi has been in court trying to get some missing emails — or data about them — that could further expose the political motivation behind the prosecution of the WikiLeaks publisher.  

Joe Lauria and Mohamed Elmaazi / Consortium News, October 23, 2024

A tribunal in Britain is set to decide whether to order the government’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to prove it deleted emails that may have covered up more evidence of a politically motivated prosecution of Julian Assange.

The three judges heard arguments on Sept. 24 in the nearly decade-long freedom of information saga regarding the emails that top British prosecutors say were deleted. 

They involved an exchange with Sweden during a Swedish prosecutor’s attempt, beginning in 2010, to extradite the WikiLeaks publisher from Britain.  ……………………………………………………….

It was only when the U.S. realized it would lose on appeal after a four-year extradition battle that the Department of Justice cut a plea deal with Assange who was released on June 24 and returned to his native Australia. 

Assange had been charged in the United States under the Espionage Act for possessing and publishing defense information, which revealed evidence of U.S. war crimes. 

Britain took an active role in Assange’s prosecution. Its Crown Prosecution Service sought to stop Sweden from going to the embassy to question him. 

Seeking to learn more about Britain’s role against Assange,  Italian investigative journalist  Stefania Maurizi first made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2015 for all emails between the British and Swedish governments concerning Assange. 

Some of the emails she obtained showed political motivation on the part of the lead British prosecutor, Paul Close. One email Maurizi obtained from the Swedish Prosecution Authority (SPA) revealed that Close appeared to be pressuring Swedish prosecutors to continue seeking Assange’s extradition instead of dropping the case or questioning him at the Ecuadorian embassy, where Assange had been granted asylum………………………….

After Maurizi noticed a sizeable gap in the emails released to her she filed another FIOA seeking to obtain the missing emails. 

The CPS first claimed that it had destroyed the emails. It said that when Close retired, his account along with his emails, were automatically destroyed.  

But Maurizi did not buy it.  She asked the court at the hearing last month to order the CPS to turn over “metadata” — data about data, such as file creation and modification dates, email sender and recipient addresses, timestamps, email routing information, keywords, and subject lines — proving the emails really were deleted and when.

“We have NO certainty whatsoever” that the emails were destroyed, Maurizi wrote in a message to Consortium News. Maurizi is in court because she believes the allegedly deleted emails could provide additional evidence of a politically motivated prosecution of Assange.

……………………………………………‘When, How & Why’ Were the Emails Deleted?

Maurizi, who travelled to London from Rome to attend the Sept. 24 hearing at the First-Tier Tribunal (General Regulatory Chamber), is challenging the ongoing failure of the CPS to respond adequately to her December 2019 FOIA about the missing emails.

………………………………………………………………….Maurizi is betting the tribunal will agree with her that metadata is clearly information that can be requested under the Act and which can clearly be provided with little difficulty. If she succeeds, future FOIA requests will also be able to demand metadata if and when an individual thinks it may be useful. 

Hillary, who was called to testify for the CPS, freely admitted to the tribunal that she could easily provide the metadata Maurizi requested and that she would be happy to do so, as long as any information which identified individuals is redacted.

The tribunal will also consider whether to “order the CPS to carry out a proper, full search for information held” as to “when, how and why?” the thousands of emails were allegedly deleted while Assange’s Swedish extradition case was still very much active. 

No date has yet been set for the announcement of the tribunal’s decision.  https://consortiumnews.com/2024/10/23/fighting-for-more-evidence-of-assanges-political-prosecution/

October 26, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | legal, UK | Leave a comment

Sellafield Fined for Cybersecurity Failures at Nuclear Site

 Sellafield Ltd has been fined £332,500 ($437,440) for cybersecurity
failings running the Sellafield nuclear facility in Cumbria, North-West
England. The fine was issued by Westminster Magistrates Court following a
prosecution brought by the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR), the UK’s
independent nuclear regulator.

Sellafield Ltd has also been ordered to pay
prosecution costs of £53,253.20 ($70,060). The offences relate to
Sellafield’s management of the security around its information technology
systems between 2019 to 2023 and breaches of the Nuclear Industries
Security Regulations 2003.

 Infosecurity 4th Oct 2024 https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/sellafield-fined-cybersecurity/

October 7, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | legal, UK | Leave a comment

Former Sellafield consultant claims the nuclear complex tampered with evidence

Whistleblower Alison McDermott claims former employer Sellafield tampered with metadata in letters used in evidence during an employment tribunal.

Tommy Greene, Bill Goodwin, Computer Weekly, 22 Apr 24

A former consultant at Sellafield has claimed that metadata in letters used against her in a tribunal hearing by the nuclear facility has been interfered with.

A tribunal has heard that three letters produced by managers at the vast nuclear complex and submitted as evidence in the employment dispute were “fabricated” and “tampered with”.

Alison McDermott lost a whistleblowing claim against the Cumbrian nuclear facility and is now fighting a demand to pay £40,000 costs.

The former Sellafield consultant said the metadata for one of the three letters was “wiped” by legal representatives for Sellafield.

She formally withdrew the allegations in her first employment tribunal claim against the nuclear complex.

The 2021 tribunal judgment determined that the letters were not “fabrications”.

“These letters are not fabrications, as had previously been asserted by the Claimant,” it found.

However, the ex-contractor raised her claims about the letters’ production and of alleged tampering during last week’s tribunal when defending herself from allegations she had acted “unreasonably” in the legal action with Sellafield and a regulatory body.

Sellafield maintains that McDermott’s allegations are “untrue”.

McDermott, a human resources (HR) consultant, signed a two-day-a-week contract with Sellafield worth £1,500 per day and was tasked in 2018 with looking at an employee’s sexual harassment allegations.

But within days of submitting a report that found the HR team was viewed as “broken and dysfunctional” by some staff, her contract was ended.

She has contested cost awards as a litigant-in-person during a one-day hearing in Leeds.

Summarising her arguments, tribunal judge Stuart Robertson said McDermott had suggested that the three letters used against her by Sellafield during the employment case over the termination of her contract were “fabricated and not genuine”.

Deshpal Panesar KC, who represented Sellafield at the tribunal, accused McDermott of “making baseless claims of the most damaging sort – representing an existential threat to the careers of multiple public servants”. 

Panesar said McDermott had accused Sellafield and its regulatory body, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), of “illicit conduct, fabrication of evidence and false representations” when making her case.

McDermott sought to challenge cost awards made against her, amounting to £40,000, in a previous tribunal decision.

The employment tribunal claim she brought against Sellafield in 2021 was unsuccessful. But an appeal judge found aspects of her case “troubling” and she was subsequently recognised as a whistleblower under UK employment law.

Robertson, a new tribunal judge, is now considering whether McDermott’s claims and conduct have been “unreasonable”.

McDermott claims she suffered a number of detriments when her contract was terminated. She has since spoken out publicly against Sellafield, branding its workplace culture as “toxic”.

Sellafield and the NDA have contested the claims robustly, initially arguing McDermott’s work was ended for “financial reasons” and later as a result of her “poor” performance.

Suspicious of the letters

The three letters have been a central point of contention in McDermott’s court battle.

The Information Commissioner’s Office ruled in early 2021 that Sellafield had acted unlawfully, having broken data laws and committed security breaches for, among other things, failing to supply McDermott with the letters after she had made a data subject access request.

Sellafield subsequently used the critical letters against McDermott in the employment tribunal case she brought over the termination of her contract.

McDermott told Thursday’s tribunal that the letters had caused her “significant detriment”………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… more https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366581793/Former-Sellafield-consultant-claims-the-nuclear-complex-tampered-with-evidence

April 26, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | legal, UK | Leave a comment

Chris Hedges: Julian Assange’s Day in Court

The defense must convince the two judges that the District Judge made serious legal errors to see an appeal granted.  

They argued that espionage is, as a matter of law, a political offense and that the extradition treaty with the U.S. prohibits extradition for political offenses. They focused on the extensive UK law, common law and international law that defines espionage as a “pure political offense” because e it is directed against a state apparatus. For this reason, those charged with espionage should be protected from extradition.

The hearing was, after those in 2020 that focused on Julian’s mental and psychological health, refreshing in that it discussed the crimes committed by the U.S. and the importance of making them public.

Julian Assange’s lawyers — in a final bid on Tuesday to stop his extradition — fought valiantly to poke holes in the case of the prosecution to obtain an appeal.

By Chris Hedges https://scheerpost.com/2024/02/21/chris-hedges-julian-assanges-day-in-court/

LONDON — By the afternoon the video link, which would have allowed Julian Assange to follow his final U.K. appeal to prevent his extradition, had been turned off. Julian, his attorneys said, was too ill to attend, too ill even to follow the court proceedings on a link, although it was possible he was no longer interested in sitting through another judicial lynching. The rectangular screen, tucked under the black wrought iron bars that enclosed the upper left hand corner balcony of the courtroom where Julian would have been caged as a defendant, was perhaps a metaphor for the emptiness of this long and convoluted judicial pantomime. 

he arcane procedural rules — the lawyers in their curled blonde wigs and robes, the spectral figure of the two judges looking down on the court from their raised dais in their gray wigs and forked white collars, the burnished walnut paneled walls, the rows of lancet windows, the shelves on either side filled with law books in brown, green, red, crimson, blue and beige leather bindings, the defense lawyers, Edward Fitzgerald KC and Mark Summers KC, addressing the two judges, Dame Victoria Sharp and Justice Johnson, as “your lady” and “my lord” — were all dusty Victorian props employed in a modern Anglo-American show trial. It was a harbinger of a decrepit justice system that, subservient to state and corporate power, is designed to strip us of our rights by judicial fiat.

The physical and psychological disintegration of Julian, seven years trapped in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and nearly five years held on remand in the high-security HM Prison Belmarsh, was always the point, what Nils Melzer the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture calls his “slow-motion execution.”  Political leaders, and their echo chambers in the media, fall all over themselves to denounce the treatment of Alexei Navalny but say little when we do the same to Julian. The legal farce grinds forward like the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House. It will probably grind on for a few more months — one can’t expect the Biden administration to add the extradition of Julian to all its other political woes. It may take months to issue a ruling, or grant one or two appeal requests, as Julian continues to waste away in HM Prison Belmarsh. 

Julian’s nearly 15-year legal battle began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified military files from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — including footage showing a U.S. helicopter gunning down civilians, including two Reuters journalists in Baghdad. He took refuge in London’s Ecuadorian embassy, before being arrested by the Metropolitan Police in 2019 who were permitted by the Ecuadorian embassy to enter and seize him. He has been held for nearly five years in HM Prison Belmarsh.

Julian did not commit a crime. He is not a spy. He did not purloin classified documents. He did what we all do, although he did it in a far more important way. He published voluminous material, leaked to him by Chelsea Manning, which exposed U.S. war crimes, lies, corruption, torture and assassinations. He ripped back the veil to expose the murderous machinery of the U.S. empire.

The two-day hearing is Julian’s last chance to appeal the extradition decision made in 2022 by the then British home secretary, Priti Patel. On Wednesday the prosecution will make its arguments. If he is denied an appeal he can request the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) for a stay of execution under Rule 39, which is given in “exceptional circumstances” and “only where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.” But the British court may order Julian’s immediate extradition prior to a Rule 39 instruction or may decide to ignore a request from the ECtHR to allow Julian to have his case heard by the court.

District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in January 2021, at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, refused to authorize the extradition request. In her 132-page ruling, she found that there was a “substantial risk” Julian would commit suicide due to the severity of the conditions he would endure in the U.S. prison system. At the same time, she accepted all the charges leveled by the U.S. against Julian as being filed in good faith. She rejected the arguments that his case was politically motivated, that he would not get a fair trial in the U.S. and that his prosecution is an assault on the freedom of the press.

Baraitser’s decision was overturned after the U.S. government appealed to the High Court in London. Although the High Court accepted Baraitser’s conclusions about Julian’s “substantial risk” of suicide if he was subjected to certain conditions within a U.S. prison, it also accepted four assurances in U.S. Diplomatic Note no. 74, given to the court in February 2021, which promised Julian would be treated well. The “assurances” state that Julian will not be subject to Special Administrative Measure. They promise that Julian, an Australian citizen, can serve his sentence in Australia if the Australian government requests his extradition. They promise he will receive adequate clinical and psychological care. They promise that, pre-trial and post-trial, Julian will not be held in the Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado.

February 22, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | legal, UK | Leave a comment