The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) faces a legal challenge over its refusal to confirm or deny whether it has shared correspondence with US law enforcement agencies about three prominent members of WikiLeaks staff, including two British citizens, whose personal emails were secretly disclosed to US prosecutors.

Stefania Maurizi, an investigative journalist for La Repubblica, will argue at an appeal tribunal today that it is in the public interest for the police force to reveal whether it has exchanged information about the current and former WikiLeaks employees with the US.

The case comes only days after it emerged that a US prosecutor had mistakenly revealed that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been charged with crimes in the US, after apparently mistakenly cutting and pasting Assange’s name into an indictment on an unrelated case.

Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in 2012, after losing his appeal against extradition to Sweden following allegations of sexual assault by two Swedish women. He remains there still. The case was closed in 2017.

The police spent at least £13m policing the embassy between June 2012 and October 2015, when it ended 24-hour physical surveillance of the embassy, in favour of cheaper “overt and covert” tactics to arrest Assange, who fears extradition to the US if he leaves the embassy.

Maurizi is using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to seek disclosure of information held by the Metropolitan Police on former investigations editor Sarah Harrison and two current staff – section editor Joseph Farrell, and editor in chief Kristinn Hrafnsson.

The WikiLeaks employees learned in 2014 that a court in East Virginia had ordered Google to disclose their personal emails, contacts, calendar entries and log-in IP addresses to the US government, as part of an investigation into alleged violations of US federal laws, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the US Espionage Act.

Jennifer Robinson, a human rights lawyer acting for WikiLeaks and Maurizi, said the hearing raised significant questions about the jurisdiction the US has over British journalists and editors.

“We want to know what role the British government and the British police are playing in that process, now that we know that information subpoenaed from these British journalists and editors likely contributed to the criminal investigation in the US and the indictment of Julian Assange,” she said.

In this interview, investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi talks about her use of FoI requests to gain information about Julian Assange’s extradition case (filming by Niels Ladefoged)

Row over consent to disclose personal data One of the issues under dispute in the current case is whether Maurizi had secured adequate consent from the three journalists for the Metropolitan Police to disclose their personal data to the wider public. Maurizi obtained letters, and later signed witness statements, from each journalist, giving permission for the Met Police to release their personal information to Maurizi to use in her reporting on WikiLeaks. But the police service argued that it could not be certain that the journalists had “explicitly and freely given their materially informed consent to the disclosure of personal data” – a decision upheld by the information commissioner. The witness statements would need to be confirmed as genuine, and it would be unreasonable to expect a public authority, such as the Metropolitan Police Service, to undertake to do so, the commissioner held following a tribunal ruling in March 2018. Robinson, representing Maurizi, said: “We are challenging the fact that they [MPS] are using the personal data exemption in circumstances where the journalists and editors have given their consent to the release of that information.”

Kafka is ‘alive and well’ Hrafnsson and Farrell are expected to give evidence in person at the East London Tribunal Centre today, confirming that they gave full consent to Maurizi to ask the Metropolitan Police to release any personal data they held on them. Farrell wrote in a tweet in June: “What a bizarre state of affairs that I have to go to court and testify to get MY OWN data released to MYSELF. Kafka is alive and well it seems.” Hrafnsson said in written evidence to the tribunal that it was made “abundantly” clear to him that Maurizi would use any personal data released about him by the Metropolitan Police “in her capacity as an investigative journalist and would be publishing stories based on the information she received”. He said he gave consent in the “full knowledge” of how Maurizi intended to use the “relevant personal data about me that would be released to her”. The WikiLeaks journalists and editors Kristinn Hrafnsson Kristinn Hrafnsson is currently the WikiLeaks editor in chief, after having worked for WikiLeaks as a spokesman since 2010. A well-established Icelandic investigative journalist, Hrafnsson has worked on high-profile disclosures with WikiLeaks. Hrafnsson has helped Julian Assange and his team to handle some of the most sensitive publications, such as the US secret documents of the Afghan and Iraq wars, the US diplomacy cables, the Guantanamo files, and many other high-profile revelations. In September 2018, Julian Assange made Hrafnsson editor in chief of WikiLeaks, when the Ecuadorian government denied Assange any internet and phone communications and any access to visitors, except his lawyers, from March 2018 onwards. Sarah Harrison, former investigations editor at WikiLeaks Sarah Harrison is described as one of the most crucial WikiLeaks journalists. She has handled some of the most sensitive publications, contributing to verifying whether the files were genuine, coordinating the media partners and training them in encryption. In 2013, Harrison travelled to Hong Kong to assist Edward Snowden as he sought political asylum. She spent 40 days with Snowden while he remained in a Moscow airport, before being granted asylum by Russia. She later spent four months with Snowden in Moscow. Joseph Farrell, WikiLeaks section editor Joseph Farrell is a British journalist who has collaborated with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks from a early stage. He has always kept a low profile, he has assisted WikiLeaks in handling some of its most sensitive assignments, and has maintained contact with WikiLeaks supporters. Together with Sarah Harrison, Farrell acted as one of the securities to help Assange secure bail. Source: Stefania Maurizi The information commissioner and the Metropolitan Police claim that the time for the journalists to give consent was in Maurizi’s initial freedom of information application, rather than in a later appeal. Both bodies argue that the three journalists were not alerted to the fact that they could have obtained the same data through a “more appropriate” route, a subject access request under the Data Protection Act. Lawyers for Maurizi argue that there is nothing in law to prevent personal data being accessed through the Freedom of Information Act with the consent of the data subjects. They accuse the Met of failing in its statutory duty to assist Maurizi by specifying what it would regard as an acceptable form of consent from the three journalists.

Swedish FOIA requests reveal UK tactics Maurizi began using the Freedom of Information Act to request public-interest information on WikiLeaks in 2015. In 2017, she obtained correspondence between the Swedish Prosecution Authority (SPA) and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which shed light on discussions between the UK and Sweden over allegations made against Assange by two Swedish women. Documents released under Swedish freedom of information laws revealed that the CPS had advised the SPA not to agree to Assange’s request for Swedish investigators to interview Assange in the UK, but to pursue Assange’s extradition. The then Crown Prosecution lawyer, Paul Close, wrote to his counterparts Ola Lofgren and Marianne Ny in Sweden in 2011 repeating his earlier advice that “in my view it would not be prudent for the Swedish authorities to try to interview the defendant in the UK”.

CPS lawyers offer Swedes a Christmas present In an email to Ny, dated 29 November 2012, Close went on to say that the UK authorities would not allow Assange to leave the Embassy of Ecuador to seek medical treatment, despite reports on the BBC World Service about his deteriorating health. “There is no question of him being allowed outside of the Ecuadorian embassy, treated and then being allowed to go back. He would be arrested as soon as appropriate,” he wrote. Close suggested he was optimistic that Assange could be extradited before Christmas, writing to Ny: “I am sure you can guess what I would just love to send you as a Christmas present.” In a previous email to the SPA on 13 January 2011, Close suggested that Assange’s extradition was being handled differently to other extradition cases. “Please do not think that the case is being dealt with as just another extradition request,” he wrote.

UK delays kept Assange in Ecuadorian embassy Maurizi said she suspected that the disclosure of the CPS emails to the US would show that the UK played a significant role in delaying Sweden’s failure to progress the investigation against Assange – which effectively kept him in arbitrary detention in the Ecuadorian embassy. The fact that a US court subpoenaed information from Google from the email accounts of journalists as part of an investigation under the US Espionage Act raises significant public interest concerns about the reach of government warrants, privacy and free speech, she said. “It is a matter of substantial public interest to understand whether or not the UK authorities are communicating or cooperating with the US in an investigation of this nature” Stefania Maurizi, investigative journalist The Espionage Act, originally intended to prosecute spies, has been increasingly used by presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump against journalists and their sources. The act has been used to punish some of the most important journalistic sources of the past 50 years, including Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner, who was sentenced to five years after leaking a secret document showing alleged attempts by Russia to hack the American voting system. Maurizi has established that the SPA holds 34 lever arch files on Assange, totalling between 7,200 and 9,000 pages of correspondence. In two years, she has managed to obtain only 27 emails from the CPS and the SPA, reinforcing, she said, just how little transparency there has been on the Assange case. “It is a matter of substantial public interest to understand whether or not the UK authorities are communicating or cooperating with the US in an investigation of this nature into individuals who are British citizens or are working with journalists in the UK and Europe,” she said.