Observers from Reporters Without Borders said they sometimes had to queue outside for as long as five hours, very early in the morning, to secure one of the few public-gallery seats at Julian Assange’s UK court hearings. In a February 2024 Guardian article, the organisation’s representatives described shifting barriers to access and said that, during the pandemic, they were once threatened with arrest merely for queuing to enter court. RSF ultimately became the only NGO to monitor the full proceedings. The object of this line was not a scarce performance ticket but a seat in a process formally governed by open justice. When gallery capacity is tiny, public access is converted into an early-arrival contest. The five-hour queue measured the difference between a hearing being legally open and being practically observable.