My Take | The case of Julian Assange is a permanent stain on Anglo-American ‘democracy’

As the top US State Department official decried China for committing “transnational repression”, her government has been engaged in arguably this century’s most infamous example of the practice: the persecution, sorry, prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

For Uzra Zeya, the undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy and human rights, the timing is too embarrassing. British Home Secretary Priti Patel has just signed off on Assange’s extradition to the United States on charges under the Espionage Act from the World War I era.

The law’s century-old war origins should give people pause. In truth, its application in Assange’s case is a blatant display of domestic judicial abuse, extraterritorial overreach and the vassalage of Great Britain and Australia.

As some legal experts have pointed out, the secrecy provisions under the Espionage Act of 1917 originally concerned “the national defence”, that is, strictly military matters rather than “national security”, a concept that is of more recent pedigree and which did not exist back then.

But government lawyers from the Obama administration onward have been given wide latitude retroactively to impose the “national security” concept into this old and virtually unrelated law to go after whistle-blowers, leakers and investigative journalists. They are correct that most Americans have been sufficiently brainwashed to not question such a misapplication.