Given Assange's discharge by Baraitser, his team hoped that bail -- his release from a high-security prison while the lengthy appeals process unfolds -- would prove a formality. They hurried to make such an application after the extradition ruling on Monday, assuming that the legal logic of her decision dictated his release. Baraitser demurred, suggesting that they prepare their case and make it to her more fully on Wednesday.
It now seems clear the judge manipulated Assange's defense team. Apparently like Assange's lawyers, former British ambassador Craig Murray, who has attended and reported on the hearings in detail, was lulled by Baraitser into assuming that she wanted a cast-iron case from the defense to justify a decision to release Assange on bail.
There were good reasons for their confidence. Any move to prevent his release would look perverse given that she had decided Assange should not be extradited or stand trial in the US.
Suicide dangerThey were deceived. Baraitser denied bail, effectively signaling that she thinks her ruling might be wrong and overturned in a higher court. That is extraordinary. It suggests that she has no confidence in her own judgment of the facts of the case. As Murray has noted: "There was little or no precedent for the High Court overturning any ruling against extradition on Section 91 health grounds."
Any appeal by the US against Baraitser's ruling to discharge Assange will be hard to win. Its lawyers will have to prove that she was wrong not on her interpretation of the law, but in assessing verifiable facts. They will have to show that she was deceived by prison experts who warned -- based on submissions made by the US itself -- that Assange would be subjected to permanent, inhuman solitary confinement in a US super-max jail or that she was misled by medical experts who warned that in these conditions Assange would be at significant risk of suicide.
But the perversity of Baraitser's decision runs deeper still. Her ruling keeps him locked up in Belmarsh, a high-security prison in London that is Britain's version of a super-max jail. Her refusal to free him, or put him in house arrest with a GPS monitoring tag, flagrantly contradicts the expert assessments she concurred with during Monday's extradition decision: that Assange is at high risk of suicide. Those expert evaluations are based on his current state -- caused by his incarceration in Belmarsh.
Unlike Assange, most of Belmarsh's inmates have been convicted or charged with major crimes. But while Assange long ago served out his only offence, a minor violation of the UK's bail regulations, he has been routinely held in even worse conditions than the other prisoners.
If Assange's mental health is in such poor shape and he is so likely to commit suicide, it is because of the horrifying regime of abuse he has already faced in Belmarsh over the past nearly two years -- a regime classified as torture by the UN's expert on the subject, Nils Melzer. Raising Assange's hopes of release and then shutting him back in his cell, denying him the chance to see his partner and two young children for the first time since March, risks tipping him over the edge -- an edge Baraitser herself is only too aware of and on which she based her decision to deny extradition.
No "flight risk"
In fact, the judge was up to something else entirely in delaying the bail hearing till Wednesday, two days later. She wanted -- as presumably did those who have been supervising her behind the scenes -- to refashion the image of her court, which for months has given every appearance of being entirely beholden to the US administration.
As the corporate media briefly raised its head from its slumber to meaningfully acknowledge for the first time the Assange hearings, she wanted to ensure those reports noted how independent her court was. For two days, commentators could crow about British legal sovereignty and humanitarian values, even as most tacitly accepted her dangerous premise that the US has a justified claim to extradite Assange.
When Baraitser slammed the cell door shut once again on Assange, leaving him exactly where he was before she discharged him, her decision was presented as little more than a technical ruling based on a reasonable assessment of Assange's "flight risk."
In fact, Assange is no flight risk, and never was. He didn't "jump bail" in 2012 by heading into the Ecuadorean embassy. He sought political asylum there to escape the very real threat of being extradited to the US for his journalism. He was accepted by the Ecuadorean authorities because they believed his fears were genuine.
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