Editorial: Julian Assange ultimately helped the enemies of free speech

The Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is free, and will soon be home in Australia.

​Many free speech advocates will be delighted that he has struck a plea deal with the US to end an extraordinary 14-year legal battle.

Instead of facing time in US high security prison, Assange is being released on the basis of time already served in custody, or in a form of imprisonment (he spent seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, which must have been a grim spell of effective incarceration).

Assange published a vast amount of US intelligence material online in 2010, for which he won awards. There is no doubt that it was fascinating stuff.

As a newspaper, for example, indeed the oldest English language daily title in the world, we very much support free expression and open information. The Belfast News Letter was founded in the 1730s, at a time when newspapers helped advance society by extending the reach of knowledge and information.

A world in which there is a free press, free speech, democracy, and an independent legal system is one in which bad things such as corruption are far less likely to happen. But some of Assange’s defenders are utterly naive. If all government information is available at all times to everyone, it would be impossible to govern.

Not only that, it would greatly embolden bad countries such as Russia, China and Iran that do not allow any such freedoms in their own countries, lest it curtail their rulers. As one example of that, the Chinese public is not even allowed to commemorate the government’s massacre of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of students protesting for democracy 35 years ago in Beijing, in fact they cannot even know the details of what happened.

This is evil. And Assange is a man who has undermined the western societies that have such freedoms and bolstered brutal enemies who do not. He is lucky to be free.