Laurie Penny: If you really believe in WikiLeaks, you must want Assange to face up to justice

Governments cannot be trusted currently to deliver justice and accountability

(Darren Diss)

Which would you rather have – women’s rights or freedom of speech? Standing outside the Ecuadorian Embassy on Sunday, listening to various venerable activists give rousing speeches, that’s the choice that seemed to have been placed before the international left in the person of Julian Paul Assange.

When the Wikileaks founder finally appeared on the balcony he praised the crowd for their courage. Nobody mentioned his being wanted for questioning in Sweden on alleged counts of rape and sexual assault. For Assange and his supporters, his persecution by Interpol has nothing to do with that, and everything to do with his release of confidential diplomatic cables and videos showing the US Army gunning down unarmed civilians and independent journalists in Iraq.

The idea that Assange cannot be prosecuted for charges related to a sexual assault without being prosecuted for charges related to exposing diplomatic secrets is one that the government of the United States is trying very hard to make reality. It is in their interests to ensure that Assange’s army of supporters cannot defend Wikileaks without also being seen to defend his sexual conduct, whatever the truth of the case.

“The allegations are beyond pathetic and ridiculous,” Andreas Kohl, a 17-year-old German-American Wikileaks supporter, told me. “It’s about freedom of speech, and there is absolutely no evidence of him committing anything that would be remotely considered rape.” Then there were the 15-year-old twin boys who told me that they thought the charges were “made up” because “he’s someone with a lot of information, and they want to get him to a place where they can extradite him.” This is the message that idealistic young men all over the world are learning from this case: governments need to be held to account, independent journalism is powerful, and women lie about rape.

“It’s something that can just happen, you know,” said Bradford MP George Galloway, commenting on the case and defending the right of men everywhere not to have to ask “prior to each insertion”. Interestingly enough, “something that can just happen” is almost exactly how the United States describes collateral slaughter in the Middle East. It’s unfortunate, but it happens, and the victims were probably dressed unwisely. On the subject of women and their malicious lies, powerful white men across the political spectrum are curiously unanimous: just this week, Republican senatorial candidiate Todd Akin was criticised for repeating the myth that women cannot become pregnant in situations of “legitimate rape”.

Ironically, in a case that is supposed to be all about radical transparency, the precise legal issues at play in Assange’s extradition are murky and misunderstood by practically everyone without access to every email chain. What charges is he facing, or are they just allegations, and does that matter before he crosses the Swedish border? Was it rape or just, in Galloway’s delicate phraseology, “bad sexual etiquette”? Can he really be legally extradited to the United States if he goes to Sweden, or will the US government make use of loopholes allowing his removal and prosecution? Nobody in the crowd outside the embassy seemed sure of the facts. Not the Occupy London supporters in Anonymous masks. Not the Ecuadorian women chanting support for their president, whose re-election campaign has been boosted by his support for Assange. And certainly not the police shoving journalists into a pen on the pavement “for our own safety”.

Let’s be clear here: nobody should have to stifle one set of principles in order to allow another to live. If you choose to do so, that’s a matter for your conscience. For myself, I believe in freedom of speech, and in the power of journalism– it’s what I do for a living. I believe that governments need to be made to answer for pursuing profit in the name of peace and massacring thousands in the name of security. I believe in ending the age of secrecy, and I believe that the United States currently seeks to prevent that by pursuing and prosecuting hackers, whistleblowers and journalists across the world. And I also believe women.

I believe women when they say that their sexual consent is infringed, violently and coercively, by men they trust and admire, as well as by strangers. I believe that rape and sexual violence are wilfully ignored and misunderstood by governments except when the victims happen to be accusing radical transparency campaigners of assault. I believe that it is possible to believe women and to support Wikileaks at the same time without moral hypocrisy, and I believe that those across the left who seem to have a problem with holding those two simple ideas in their head at the same time need to ask themselves what accountability actually means.

Nobody should be forced to choose between defending investigative journalism and freedom of speech and fighting for justice in the global war on women’s bodies. So please, don’t ask if one alleged sex attacker out of hundreds of millions currently walking free and unpursued across three continents should be made to answer for his actions in a court of law when all that distinguishes him from the rest of the army of decent men doing despicable things to women without facing the consequences is the fact that he happens to have personally embarrassed several governments. Please don’t ask, because the answer hurts.

The answer is that of course, Julian Assange should be held to account, of course he should, and he should be held to account in a system where due process means something and women are respected, and currently that system does not exist. Come back to me when the 19,000 annual sex attacks committed by members of the US Army and private contractors against their own fellow soldiers are prosecuted. Come back to me when Private Bradley Manning is free.

That’s not a torturous way of saying, don’t come back to me at all. I want that world right now, and I want to see everyone else who
believes in basic principles of truth and transparency put down their prejudices and fight for that world with some semblance
of consistency.

It all comes down to justice and accountability. Those are not things that world governments can currently be trusted to deliver at an international level, not for women, and not for the victims of war. Julian Assange should be held to account, and the system to do so fairly while protecting the work of Wikileaks does not exist, and anyone who believes in freedom needs to fight for both.

It is not only possible to defend both women’s rights and freedom of speech. It is morally inconsistent to defend one without the other. Cultures of secrecy, covert violence and unaccountability need to be exposed. That’s what Wikileaks is supposed to be about, and it’s also what feminism is about, and right now, governments are terrified of both. That, if nothing else, should tell us where the lines of power are really drawn.

twitter.com/@pennyred