By Sevim Dagdelen
Campaigners for peace, democracy, sovereignty – and the truth – around the world owe a debt of gratitude to Julian Assange for his exposing of the double standards, lies, and evils perpetrated by imperialist powers globally.
There is hardly any other context in which the hypocrisy of the West on the question of human rights, democracy, and freedom comes to light as starkly as in the case of Julian Assange. For 13 years now, the journalist and founder of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowing platform has been deprived of his freedom. For his investigative work, such as the video “Collateral Murder”, which was released in 2010 and documents the murder of Iraqi civilians, including two journalists working for Reuters, by the US Army in Iraq, and the “Afghan War Diaries” on NATO warfare in Afghanistan, Assange is set to remain behind bars until his dying breath. With the decision by British Home Secretary Priti Patel in mid-June, his extradition to the US is now one essential step closer. Every decent citizen, every decent democrat is called to stand up for life and liberty. The fight begins now. In the United Kingdom, where Assange is imprisoned, and everywhere else.
Following the appeal of Julian Assange’s legal team against the Conservative hardliner’s decision at the British High Court, the seemingly endless proceedings are now entering the next round. Unlike Chilean dictator and mass murderer, Augusto Pinochet, who enjoyed his “extradition custody” in London at the turn of the millennium under house arrest in a posh mansion where he received visits from numerous prominent supporters, including former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Assange has eked out an undignified existence at the high-security Belmarsh prison, the “British Guantánamo”, for three years, while the sword of Damocles of extradition to the US hangs over him. Because of his journalistic work in cooperation with media outlets such as the Guardian in the UK, the New York Times, and the German magazine, Der Spiegel, Assange faces up to 175 years in a US prison. On the basis of the Espionage Act – a law dating from the time of the First World War for the prosecution of spies and saboteurs – the Wikileaks founder is to be locked away for the rest of his life. With this unspeakable charge, journalism has been declared a crime. It is not for no reason that every serious journalist and press freedom organisation around the world have issued warnings against this setting of a dangerous precedent for other journalists and media by extraditing Julian Assange to the US.
Calls for his freedom are growing louder and louder across the globe, in parliaments as well as in extra-parliamentary protests. It is up to US President Joe Biden to end the political persecution of Assange and to stop this unspeakable attack on press freedom. We must now collectively turn up the pressure on the Democrats in the US and the executive administration there.
In June, an international alliance of journalists’ unions reiterated their call for Assange’s immediate release from British custody. The British Government’s decision to extradite Assange to the US was a “flagrant violation of human rights” and showed “total contempt for freedom of the press” according to the statement issued by union representatives from Germany, France, the UK, Spain, and Australia.
In Australia, thanks to a major solidarity campaign initiated by his family, pressure is growing on the new government to keep its word that it would work to put an end to the political persecution of Assange. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared that he would intervene diplomatically and discuss this case with the US administration. While Australia’s previous conservative government had for years refrained from publicly calling for the journalist’s release, Albanese, as an opposition politician for the Labour Party, had explicitly affirmed during his election campaign that Assange had “already paid a heavy price”. “Enough is enough!” he stated publicly.
It is a major achievement that, 18 months after the establishment of the Free Julian Assange cross-party working group, the German Bundestag stated its position on this case for the first time at the beginning of July. By adopting a recommendation for a decision of the Petitions Committee, all parliamentary groups, with the exception of the conservatives, condemned the political persecution of Assange as an “attack on the freedom of the press”. The German Government is explicitly called upon to campaign for the release of the journalist and Wikileaks founder from British custody and for the blocking of his extradition to the US. In a joint cross-party declaration, more than 80 Members of Parliament spoke out against the extradition of Julian Assange to the US – which means that, following a letter from German MPs to the British House of Commons at the beginning of May, the number of supporters in the German Bundestag for the life and freedom of Julian Assange has more than doubled within the course of just a few weeks.
With countless protests and campaigns, a diverse social movement is also drawing attention to Assange’s case on the streets. Thanks to persistent work, endless conversations, and courageous people, it has been possible to establish a broad cross-party network of solidarity in Germany consisting of numerous figures from the fields of press, culture, science, and politics. Julian Assange is no longer the political pariah that he was branded for many years.
Pressure is growing on the German Government to no longer abandon the dissident of the West. There are five ministers on the government benches who, shortly before the elections to the Bundestag, called for the persecution of the Wikileaks founder to cease in the interest of defending freedom of the press, including Deputy Chancellor Robert Habeck, and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who says that she is committed to a “value-oriented foreign policy”. Those who now seriously claim that Assange would receive a “very fair trial” in the US should he be extradited – i.e., in the country whose secret service, the CIA, demonstrably planned the journalist’s abduction and murder – are showing their capacity for opportunism as opposed to having a backbone.
The criminal energy of the US government in the context of Julian Assange’s political persecution is also reflected in the espionage lawsuit against the CIA and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as well as against the Spanish security firm, Undercover Global, filed by two US attorneys representing the Wikileaks founder and two journalists. The plaintiffs accuse the CIA of having copied data from their telephones and computers and of recording confidential conversations during their visits to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was granted sanctuary and political asylum from 2012 to 2019. They claimed that the CIA had violated the protection of private conversations enshrined in the United States Constitution.
Julian Assange’s right to a fair trial has been compromised by CIA espionage. Thanks to its unconstitutional activities, the US government, which is pushing for the journalist’s extradition and sentencing, is intimately familiar with the contents of the defence lawyers’ discussions.
With the ongoing persecution of Julian Assange, the US government is undermining this fundamental right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. It is the civic duty of each and every democrat to stand up against this. The chief task of the international solidarity movement is to help to support the creation of a broad-based movement in the US that takes the protest to the streets, the media, and Congress and which raises awareness of what is at stake. The pressure on President Joe Biden must be stepped up. We owe this to Julian Assange, who put his life on the line for our freedom. The persecution of Julian Assange began in the US. It is here that it can and must be put to an end!
More info: https://assangedefense.org/
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