14 DAY TRIAL // WikiLeaks donations by Visa are allowed once more in Iceland after a three-year blockage. The ruling comes from the country’s Supreme Court.
According to the verdict, Valitor, the Visa subcontractor, had unlawfully terminated its contract with DataCell, WikiLeaks’ donation processor, ITNews reports.
Furthermore, the company must re-open the processing of donations to the famous website within the next 15 days unless they want to pay a fine which amounts to over $6,800 (€5,200) for each day.
“This is a victory for free speech,” Julian Assange says. “We thank the Icelandic people for showing that they will not be bullied by powerful Washington-backed financial services companies like Visa.”
WikiLeaks filed the suit against Valitor last summer (June 2012). They claimed that Valitor had no grounds for terminating the contract with DataCell.
The group has tweeted that the Icelandic Supreme Court is the highest court in Iceland and their decision cannot be appealed by Valitor. This means that there’s no way around this decision, unless the company wants to start paying daily penalties.
A few years ago, WikiLeaks published over 250,000 secret diplomatic notes made by U.S. officials and made many people unhappy. As a response to the scandal, Visa, MasterCard, American Express and other such operators, stopped processing payments made for WikiLeaks.
About 95% of the company’s revenue was wiped out in one go when the donations methods thinned out. The website would need to raise $1 million to continue publishing through the year, as it stated in a tweet in December.
Assange further says that he also hopes that the European Commission acknowledges that the economic blockade against WikiLeaks is unlawful and an “arbitrary censorship mechanism that threatens freedom of the press across Europe.”
The new verdict could influence the outcome of several other lawsuits started by WikiLeaks throughout Europe against subcontractors similar to Valitor.