The Pirate Party of Sweden has filed charges against banks blocking WikiLeaks payments

The Pirate Party of Sweden has today filed formal accusations against Swedish banks, which are attributed to discriminatory actions against the organization WikiLeaks. The project of Julian Assange has not systematically received donations since 2010.

Since 2010, numerous payment system operators, including Visa, MasterCard and Paypal, have blocked reception of donations to WikiLeaks and other financial transactions several times. For example, in PayPal, WikiLeaks accounts were frozen three times without any court orders, and this was motivated by the illegal nature of the activities of the recipient.

Significant funds necessary for hosting and project operation remained on the blocked accounts: about $ 20 million was lost, which accounted for 95% of all donations. WikiLeaks did not disregard this, for example, in July of this year, the partner Visa and MasterCard in Iceland were obliged to restore the servicing of the organization’s accounts in court.
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Now, charges were brought against Swedish banks. The Pirate Party of Sweden regards their actions as inappropriate and demands that this issue be reviewed in court.

The charges were brought this afternoon with the assistance of the Swedish Financial Affairs Authority (Finansinspektionen), which regulates the issuance of banking licenses and monitors the abuse of financial institutions. The presented charges are a direct consequence of the desire in the Pirate Party earlier to directly influence the actions of credit card companies and their decisions who they should serve and who they should not.

A spokesman for the Pirate Party said the blockade was a violation of freedom of opinion and expression. He expressed confidence that payment operators should not decide which organizations can accept donations. The proceedings will also help define a regulatory line that financial institutions cannot cross: for example, certain types of businesses in Sweden (sex shops, horror movie stores) were refused to accept payments for no specific reason.

The nonprofit project WikiLeaks publishes classified documents resulting from leaks: diplomatic correspondence, videotapes, messages and military records. At various times, the organization suffered from service failures with PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, PostFinance and Amazon.com, which, according to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay, violates the right to free speech. The project author Julian Assange has been in political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London for almost half a year.