Monday, March 3, 2008

The website wikileaks.org has recently been brought back online following the lifting of a court injunction forcing the site to be taken down. A representative of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which supported Wikileaks, has told Wikinews their opinion of the court injunction. They have claimed that the lifting of the injunction was a “victory for the first amendment.”

The representative stated that the ACLU hopes this injunction acts as an example to other judges who take part in similar cases. This opinion was shown when the representative said that the lifting of the injunction will “hopefully help show other courts that injunctions against speech, including speech on the Internet, are not appropriate.”

The permanent injunction was granted in the California Northern District Court in San Francisco, California to Bank Julius Baer, a Swiss bank, which has caused the domain to be taken off line in the U.S..Wikileaks previously published several documents obtained from a whistleblower of the Swiss Bank, “purportedly showing offshore tax evasion and money laundering by extremely wealthy and in some cases, politically sensitive, clients from the United States, Europe, China and Peru.”

“Blocking access to the entire site in response to a few documents posted there completely disregards the public’s right to know,” said Ann Brick a lawyer for the ACLU, in a statement made before the injunction was lifted. At least 18 other organizations have signed documents in defense of Wikileaks. Those documents have been forged into a joint amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief; which will be submitted to the court and used as defense evidence in a hearing scheduled for Friday February 29.