From an article by Di Stefania Maurizi
FOR the last six years, the Crown Prosecution Service have rejected all of our attempts to shed light on the destruction of key documents in the Julian Assange case, even though the emails were deleted when the high-profile, controversial case was still ongoing.
But now the British authorities at the Crown Prosecution Service have to come clean: they must declare whether they hold any information as to when, how and why that documentation was deleted, and if they do hold it, they must either release it to us or clarify the grounds for their refusal.
This order was just issued by the London First-tier Tribunal, chaired by Judge O’Connor, in response to our litigation based on the UK Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), in which we are represented by top-notch FOIA specialist Estelle Dehon, of Cornerstone Barristers in London.
The Crown Prosecution Service must comply with this judicial order by June 23, and any failure on their part to do so could lead to contempt proceedings.
A previous ruling issued in 2017 by the London First-tier Tribunal – chaired by a different judge, Andrew Bartlett – averred that there was ‘nothing untoward’ about their deletion, and the British body instituted to uphold information rights, the Information Commissioner (ICO), has always been pleased with the decision that there was ‘nothing untoward’ about it.
This new ruling by judge O’Connor is the first crack in the brick wall.
The British authorities are assisting the US government in extraditing a journalist for revealing war crimes and torture, as if he was a mafia boss or drug dealer.
From Amnesty International to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), all major organisations for the defence of human rights and freedom of the press have called for the extradition case to be dropped and Assange freed.
Assange remains in prison, however, waiting for British justice to decide on his appeal against extradition to the United States, where he risks 175 years in prison for obtaining and publishing classified US government files.
All requests to drop the charges and free Julian Assange have been ignored by the British and US governments.
In addition to the authoritative report by Nils Melzer and our FOIA battle, recently a British Labour member of Parliament, John McDonnell, has also submitted a FOIA request to the CPS.
Speaking to the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, John McDonnell told us: ‘It’s become clear that there must now be an independent inquiry into the role of the CPS in relation to the case of Julian Assange. We need full openness and transparency.’
The role of the Crown Prosecution Service in the Assange case.
The Crown Prosecution Service has been a key player in the case from the very beginning; since 2010, the year in which Assange and WikiLeaks published the classified US documents for which he risks life in prison, and the very same year he ended up under investigation in Sweden for alleged rape.
Four governments have been denying us access to the documentation.
Nonetheless, our FOIA work has permitted unearthing some crucial information, such as the fact that it was the Crown Prosecution Service that advised the prosecutors with the Swedish Prosecution Authority (SPA) against the only investigative strategy which could have led to a quick resolution of the Swedish case: questioning Assange in London, rather than insisting on questioning him only after extraditing him to Sweden.
This legal advice was delivered by Paul Close, a lawyer with the CPS’s Special Crime Division—the division responsible for prosecuting high-profile cases— and helped create the legal and diplomatic quagmire which kept Assange arbitrarily detained in London from 2010, initially under house arrest for 18 months and then confined in the Ecuadorian embassy for 7 years.
In 2013, even the Swedish authorities began to question the dead end into which they had waded at the advice of the British authorities by insisting on extradition. They considered dropping the extradition case, writing to the Crown Prosecution Service: ‘Hope I didn’t ruin your weekend’.
Why would a Swedish prosecutor dropping an extradition attempt for a sex case in Sweden ruin the weekend of CPS authorities?
There are too many unanswered questions in this case. Some of the key decisions were taken when the Crown Prosecution Service was headed by Keir Starmer, current leader of the British Labour Party. What role, if any, did Keir Starmer play in the Julian Assange case?
The highly anomalous handling of the Swedish case by both the Swedish prosecutors and the Crown Prosecution Service resulted in justice for no one, contributed to the devastation of Assange’s health, cost British taxpayers at least 13.2 million pounds to keep the Ecuadorian embassy under siege.
When we tried to access the full correspondence of Paul Close, the Crown Prosecution Service replied that his account had been deleted after he retired in 2014, and that ‘all the data associated with Paul Close’s account was deleted when he retired and cannot be recovered’.
Sweden also destroyed a substantial part of the documentation on the case, including an email from the FBI dated March 2017, when the CIA was formulating plans to kill or kidnap Julian Assange.
We discovered this fact only last February, and only because the Crown Prosecution Service disclosed this information about their Swedish colleagues to us after we had tried to obtain those documents from Sweden for years, to no avail.
Why were key documents destroyed by the CPS?
The Crown Prosecution Service has always maintained that there was nothing unusual about the deletion of Paul Close’s account: it was deleted three months after he retired in 2014. At that point, Keir Starmer was no longer Director of Prosecution at CPS.
It has also always maintained that the deletion of the account was consistent with their record management policies. But the CPS’s Records Management Manual states that general correspondence relating to a criminal case file should be retained for ‘5 years from the date of most recent correspondence.’ But they deleted it anyway.
So was Paul Close’s account deleted after three months, or after 30 days? And why was it deleted? Is the Crown Prosecution Service confident that all the relevant emails and documents were transferred from the email account and copied to the case file before deletion?
A Parliamentary Inquiry?
In recent months, Labour MP John McDonnell filed a FOIA request with the CPS to learn whether then-Director of Prosecution Keir Starmer was informed about the advice Paul Close gave the Swedish prosecutors not to question Assange in London, and about the fact that the Swedes considered dropping the extradition case in 2013.
He also asked which documents CPS destroyed, why, how, and on whose instructions, and if the CPS could provide him with a list of legal cases in which the Crown Prosecution Service deleted key documents in the last decade. Finally, McDonnell asked whether Paul Close’s email account could be retrieved from any backup tapes or other backup methods.
With regard to Keir Starmer, the Crown Prosecution Service replied to the British parliamentarian that a search of the documentation has revealed no indication that the CPS hold information on whether Starmer was informed about those key decisions relative to Assange.
Finally, the public authority replied that ‘CPS does not hold any back-ups of deleted email account’ and that, in the last decade, they could only identify a single case of premature destruction of case material related to a case other than that of Julian Assange. While the Crown Prosecution does not characterise the case of the deletion of Paul Close’s account as ‘data breach’, in the other case it does.
Assange’s bad luck was such that not only did the Crown Prosecution Service destroy documentation on his case, but the Swedish prosecutors did so as well. As for the rest of the correspondence between the CPS and the US authorities, obtaining it by going through the law would seem to be mission impossible.
John McDonnell believes that ‘there must now be an independent inquiry into the role of the CPS in relation to the case of Julian Assange’. It could be the last and only chance. Will it happen?