Daily News Brief

June 25, 2024

Top of the Agenda

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is expected to plead guilty to an espionage charge and receive a sentence that will allow him to immediately return to his home in Australia, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a letter filed yesterday. The agreement ends yearslong U.S. efforts to prosecute Assange for his role in publishing hundreds of thousands of secret documents about U.S. military actions overseas, especially pertaining to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as diplomatic cables. The Justice Department said his work put U.S. national security at risk. 

Assange left the high-security London prison where he has spent sixty-two months yesterday and flew to the small U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands. He is slated to attend a plea hearing and sentencing early Wednesday morning local time. The Committee to Protect Journalists said it welcomed the end of Assange’s detention, but said the U.S. government’s pursuit of Assange set a “harmful legal precedent.” (WaPo, CNN, Reuters) 

Analysis

“When he and WikiLeaks first worked with the Times, and The Guardian … and Der Spiegel on the WikiLeaks documents, these documents were carefully redacted to take out the names of anybody who could get hurt. And then he turned around and dumped completely unredacted documents on the net, which was extremely dangerous and irresponsible. He’s not a great guy. That said, bringing him to trial under the Espionage Act for committing journalism is very dangerous for [journalists],” CFR Senior Fellow Carla Anne Robbins said on this episode of The World Next Week podcast.

“Julian Assange rightly admitted he violated the law, putting thousands of American soldiers’ and informants’ lives at risk,” George Mason University’s Jamil N. Jaffer told the Washington Post. “The fact that he’ll only get time served is a crime in and of itself. He should be serving a life sentence.” 

Americas

Kenyan President William Ruto sent off around four hundred officers in a farewell ceremony in Nairobi yesterday. Around one thousand Kenyan police officers are slated to lead the UN-backed international security mission to stabilize Haiti as it battles surging gang violence. (Africanews)

Canada/China: Canada will launch a thirty-day consultation period into China’s presence in its electric vehicle sector as concerns of overcapacity loom. The Canadian government said it could respond by implementing new trade measures on imports. Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said Beijing was carrying out a “state-directed policy of overcapacity” and that Ottawa also had concerns about labor and environmental standards. (CBC)

Pacific Rim

Beijing has pressured Chinese citizens not to attend more than sixty events organized by the U.S. Embassy in China since November and has made it more difficult for Chinese students to attend U.S. universities, U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns told the Wall Street Journal. Burns said the behavior amounted to a “serious breach” and ran counter to China’s public statements in favor of increasing interpersonal ties, and that he hoped Beijing “will reconsider.” China’s foreign ministry and State Council Information Office did not comment. (WSJ)

At yesterday’s launch of CFR’s China Strategy Initiative, leading experts debated the United States’ China strategy.

Japan/South Korea: The countries will strengthen their currency swap deal with the aim of addressing weaknesses in both the Japanese yen and South Korean won. Tokyo and Seoul made the $10 billion swap agreement last year, ending an eight-year hiatus without any such deal in place. (Bloomberg)

South and Central Asia

Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will visit China early next month, the Bangladeshi government announced. Yesterday, she called for China to help return Rohingya refugees to Myanmar during a visit by a Chinese senior official. Bangladesh aims to balance close relations with both India and China; Hasina just returned from a trip to India to bolster bilateral ties. (Dhaka Tribune, UNB, AP)

India: The water minister of Delhi has begun a hunger strike to protest a lack of drinking water during a prolonged heatwave. She said the neighboring state of Haryana was taking more than its share of water; officials from that government blamed mismanagement in Delhi. (Reuters)

In this article, Madeline Babin and CFR’s Alice C. Hill and Sabine Baumgartner look at how different countries respond to extreme heat.

Middle East and North Africa

Ultra-Orthodox male students had been previously exempt from conscription into military service, but the court cited in its decision yesterday a principle of equality before the law. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition relies on two ultra-Orthodox parties to govern; for several weeks, he had aimed to advance legislation that would preserve their exemption from military service. (Times of Israel, CNN)

Iran: All six male candidates running in Iran’s presidential election this week have sought to distance themselves from harsh enforcement of headscarf requirements, the New York Times reported. Their statements reflect how public opinion on the matter has evolved since the country’s “Women, Life, Freedom” protests to resist the headscarf law and other crackdowns on womens’ rights began almost two years ago. (NYT)

This In Brief by CFR’s Kali Robinson looks at the power of Iran’s protest movement that began in 2022.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Lawmakers approved a bill to raise tax revenue by a 195–106 vote, sending it to President Ruto’s desk. Across the country, protesters—many of them young people who have struggled to get jobs in the country’s challenging market—voiced opposition to the bill and in some cases clashed with police. The Kenyan Human Rights Commission said security forces used tear gas and live ammunition on demonstrators. (Daily Nation, FT)

Nigeria: Armed attacks on farming communities in the country’s north are causing some people to abandon their farms, driving food prices up in what is already Nigeria’s worst cost of living crisis in a generation, Reuters reported. Northern Nigeria grows most of the country’s staple crops such as rice, yam, and maize. (Reuters)

Europe

European Union (EU) leadership celebrated the formal start to the process of adding the two countries to the bloc, which is expected to take years. EU officials worked to begin accession talks before Hungary assumed the rotating presidency of the bloc on July 1, as Budapest had held up some of the bloc’s initiatives related to Ukraine. (FT) 

Ukraine: President Volodymyr Zelenskyy removed General Yuriy Sodol, commander of the Joint Forces of the Armed Forces, from his post yesterday. While Zelenskyy did not cite a reason for the replacement, it followed public criticism by the head of a Ukrainian National Guard regiment that high numbers of Ukrainian soldiers had been killed under Sodol’s leadership. (NYT)

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