A LIFELINE?

Icelandic High Court Orders Visa To Resume Payments To WikiLeaks

By Elizabeth C.

IN A VICTORY FOR WIKILEAKS, Iceland’s Supreme Court has upheld a lower court ruling that the Visa contractor illegally halted payments to Julian Assange’s independent news organization.

The court ruled that Valitor must resume processing payments on behalf of WikiLeaks within 15 days or else face a fine of $6,830 per day, according to WikiLeaks.

Wikileaks hails the court victory as an “important milestone” in its battle against the West’s economic blockade. In December 2010, the organization’s economic lifeline was cut after it released a trove of diplomatic cables providing an unprecedented glimpse into U.S.’s diplomatic relationships around the world.

The U.S. Justice Department launched a criminal investigation of the records dump, which reportedly included a secret grand jury and indictment of Assange.

“This is a victory for free speech,” Assange said in a statement about the ruling. “This is a victory against the rise of economic censorship to crack down against journalists and publishers”

One month after the groundbreaking whistleblowing organization released the diplomatic cables, Visa, Western Union, Paypal and MasterCard abruptly stopped accepting donations to WikiLeaks. The economic blockade was assailed by Assange as “business McCarthyism.” But the blockade succeeded in drying up donations to the organization which has been praised by free speech activists, journalists and civil libertarians. Amnesty International UK awarded the organization its 2009 New Media Award for “exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya.”

WikiLeaks continues to challenge the economic boycott in ongoing or planned legal actions “against the international card companies and financial services companies - VISA and MasterCard,
Western Union, PayPal and Bank of America, and other payment facilitators
that…form[ed] a concerted, and equally unlawful
economic blockade against the organisation.”

In the absense of these payment services, Pentagon whistleblower Daniel Elsberg, actor John Cusack and Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Perry Barlow created the Freedom of the Press Foundation to enable anonymous, tax-deductable donations to Wikileaks and other newsgathering outlets.