Assange Court Report website archived
Material on this website remains free for all to use - refer to the permissions page for details on licensing and attribution
In early 2020, Blueprint for Free Speech set up the Assange Court Report as part of our Bridges for Media Freedom project. Our intention was to produce a series of concise and objective daily reports from WikiLeaks Publisher Julian Assange’s extradition hearings - a historically important legal case for freedom of expression.
Our reporting, which settled into twice-daily reports from court and accompanying photographs of the scenes outside, took in the initial extradition hearing in February and September 2020, the first appeal to the High Court in October 2021 and the application for a second appeal in Feburary 2024.
That appeal, which was due to be heard in July 2024, was superseded by the plea deal that enabled Julian Assange to enter Australia as a free man in June that year.
Along the way, we also covered a series of procedural and case management hearings and published many of the legal documents from the case. Much of this material has not been well-recorded elsewhere.
From the start of the project, we intended these reports and images to be freely used by others. This remains the case and we hope this archive will prove useful for those who want to understand how the legal arguments in this case proceeded on a day-to-day basis. For licensing and attribution information, please see here.
Current dynamics in the media industry have made the economics of regular court reporting challenging. Open justice demands that the public is able to follow events in court, particularly when cases have an impact on issues of genuine public importance. In this case in particular, much of which took place during the Covid-19 epidemic, public access to the courtroom was often extremely difficult to secure.
We hope that the Assange Court Report stands as an example of how civil society can step in to remedy gaps in the contemporaneous reporting provided by commercial media.
Though much of the work on the Court Report was uncredited, at this point we want to acknowledge and thank our key contributors.
Prime among them was James Doleman, an exemplary reporter and a good friend, who authored all of the reporting on this website through the first set of appeals in 2022. James’ passing in July 2023 was a great loss to British journalism.
Later reporting was supplied by Sara Chessa, who has been closely involved in this project from its inception.
We would also like to thank Guy Smallman, who provided much of the photography featured on this website. Photographs from the initial extradition hearings at Woolwich Magistrates’ Court were taken by Jekaterina Saveljeva.
Any inquiries about the project can be directed to us at [email protected]