In December last year, after WikiLeaks's publication of a large volume of leaked US diplomatic cables, Australia's Prime Minister agreed with US leaders that WikiLeaks founder, Australian citizen Julian Assange, must have broken the law. This proved to be a premature over-reaction. Not only was the law Assange had broken not identified, but the Australian Federal Police could not identify him as having broken any law.
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REX v. HADDOCK
IS IT A FREE COUNTRY?
REX v. HADDOCK
IS IT A FREE COUNTRY?
THE Court of Criminal Appeal considered to-day an important case involving the rights and liberties of the subject, if any.
Lord Light, L.C.J.: This is in substance an appeal by an appellant appealing in statu quo against a decision of the West London Half-Sessions, confirming a conviction by the magistrates of South Hammersmith sitting in Petty Court some four or five years ago. The ancillary proceedings have included two hearings in sessu and an appeal rampant on the case, as a result of which the record was ordered to be torn up and the evidence reprinted backwards ad legem. With these transactions, however, the Court need not concern itself, except to observe that, as for our learned brother Mumble, whose judgments we have read with diligence and something approaching to nausea, it were better that a millstone should be hanged round his neck and he be cast into the uttermost depths of the sea.
The present issue is one of comparative simplicity. That is to say, the facts of the case are intelligible to the least-instructed layman, and the only persons utterly at sea are those connected with the law. But factum clarum, jus nebulosum, or, 'the clearer the facts the more dubious the law'. What the appellant did in fact is simple and manifest, but what offence, if any, he has committed in law is a question of the gravest difficulty.