A public outcry followed the decision of judge Jeffrey White of the Federal District Court in San Francisco to order that the site be taken down. Free speech advocacy groups the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sought an overturning of the order.
That has now been granted, with the judge acknowledging that forcing the site to close might run counter to the US constitution's first amendment, which protects the right to free speech.
Judge White refused to extend an order banning the continued publication of the bank documents in question, saying that the ban would raise "serious questions of prior restraint [on free speech] and possible violations of the First Amendment".
Wikileaks calls itself a 'transparency group' and a forum for principled leaking of documents. It is designed to host anonymously-submitted corporate or government documents that leakers believe the public should know about.
The site hosted documents purporting to be from Julius Baer and seeming to show personal banking transactions that, it was claimed, demonstrated money laundering and tax evasion by customers with money in the Cayman Islands.
The bank claims that the documents have been doctored, that they belong to the bank and are therefore confidential. It said their publication violates privacy and banking laws.
The bank initially won two rulings in Judge White's court, one stopping the posting of more material or linking to existing material, the other ordering Wikileaks.org's domain name registrar, Dynadot, to make the address inaccessible and to stop it being transferred to another registrar.
He has now overturned both of his own orders.
The lawsuit will continue, but the reversal means that Wikileaks.org can continue to publish the documents as the case progresses.
"We're very pleased that Judge White recognised the serious constitutional concerns raised by his earlier orders," said EFF senior staff attorney Matt Zimmerman. "Attempting to interfere with the operation of an entire website because you have a dispute over some of its content is never the right approach. Disabling access to an internet domain in an effort to prevent the world from accessing a handful of widely-discussed documents is not only unconstitutional, it simply won't work."
As well as his fears about whether his orders had been constitutional, Judge White expressed doubts about whether or not his federal court had jurisdiction over Wikileaks, and whether or not it is even an entity that can be sued.
Federal courts can only rule in cases where one of the parties is located in the US. A lawyer representing the owner of the domain name wikileaks.org said that he is a resident of Kenya and a citizen of Australia, and that in any case he did not control the organisation.
The court identified Wikileaks.org as 'an entity of unknown form', leading some observers to wonder if it can be sued in the same way as a person or a company.
Judge White also said that an extension to the injunction would not even perform the function the bank wanted, and that the documents were now available on 'mirror' sites all over the world. "There is evidence in the record that 'the cat is out of the bag' and the issuance of an injunction would therefore be ineffective to protect the professed privacy rights of the bank’s client," he said.
