By Consuelo Ahumada on October 11, 2021
Assange’s case is scandalous and outrageous. The Australian journalist, founder of WikiLeaks, could now be sentenced to 175 years in prison in the US.
In this world saturated with conflicts and injustices, a piece of news that is barely registered by the media is striking.
It is the Assange case and its implications. Between October 27 and 28, the appeal hearing requested by the U.S. against the denial of his extradition by the High Court of London on January 4 was held. It is estimated that the final verdict will be known within 4-6 weeks.
The Court’s decision represented a partial achievement for the Australian journalist, at a time when fundamental rights are being swept away without measure or contemplation, in the midst of media management and the legitimization of fascist practices. The judge who made the decision made it clear that her ruling was based only on the inhumane conditions he would face at his destination, his deteriorating physical and mental health and the risk he faced of suicide.
The U.S. appeal process was completed ahead of schedule. President Biden reported that he would continue with it and rejected several requests to shelve it.
The case of Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, is scandalous and outrageous. Between 2010 and 2011 he published more than ten million classified Washington documents, relying on some of the world’s leading newspapers.
Many allegations of public interest were recorded there, especially crimes perpetrated by the U.S. military and its allies: the rampant murder of civilians in Iraq, the gloomy conditions of Guantanamo prisoners or the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib, so well recreated by Fernando Botero.
The persecution against Assange did not let up. In 2012 he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, when the government of Rafael Correa granted him political asylum. He remained there for almost seven years, until April 2019, when Lenin Moreno withdrew his asylum, yielding to U.S. blackmail.
The Australian was then forcibly removed from the Embassy and locked up in the high-security Balmarsh prison, dubbed the “British Guantanamo” by Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.
In a report he noted that he has been held there in conditions of isolation more befitting a major terrorist than a journalist on remand. His rights to defense have been systematically violated, in a shameful attitude of the London justice system in complicity with Washington. Clearly, this is an attempt to criminalize investigative journalism, he concluded.
More recently, Yahoo News uncovered a CIA-orchestrated plot to “kidnap or assassinate” the Australian while he was at the Embassy. A Spanish security firm, Undercover Global S.L, now under investigation in Madrid, is believed to have spied on him permanently.
Assange is not a U.S. citizen and has no employment ties with the United States. He did not carry out espionage work nor did he remove the information. Chelsea Manning, an American information analyst who worked in Iraq, did it. For her courage, she was sentenced to 35 years in the gloomy Alexandria prison, where she has attempted suicide three times.
If extradited, he could be sentenced to 175 years. As his lawyer pointed out at the appeal hearing, he would not receive a fair trial or even a minimal defense. He would be charged based on classified evidence, without access to his defense, before a biased jury.
In fact, the Alexandria espionage court has never acquitted a defendant. His life would be in danger because he would be in severe isolation. There are serious certifications about his extreme mental affectation and his risk of suicide.
The international mobilization in his favor has been notorious, as seen in several cities around the world last week. The Belmarsh Tribunal, formed at the initiative of the Progressive International, intensified the work for his release.
The stakes are high. The whole process, labeled as a farce, shows how it is intended to punish the whistleblower of the crime and not its perpetrators. “When speaking the truth has become a crime, while the powerful enjoy impunity, (…) we will have surrendered our voice to censorship and our fate to uncontrolled tyranny,” Melzer pointed out.
Moreover, as stated by Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, “it is grotesque that almost 20 years later, virtually no one responsible for alleged war crimes committed by the US has been brought to account (…) and yet a publisher who brought these crimes to light is facing a possible life sentence.
Finally, if extradition were denied, the British government could disregard that decision and grant extradition. In the late 1990s it denied the extradition of Augusto Pinochet to Spain, where he was wanted for crimes against humanity during the dictatorship. Instead, they offered him a pardon.
At this rate, the journalists who uncovered the Pandora Papers could also be prosecuted. The complicity and indifference of the powerful countries, so active when it comes to censoring Venezuela, is striking.
Source: Telesur, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English