Dear Mrs Patel, enough torture by solitary confinement: please release Julian Assange NOW !
Julian Assange should be given his freedom
HOORAH for the British Justice System, and SHAME on the British Political System. On January 4th, Judge Vanessa Baraitser declared that Julian Assange should NOT be extradited to the USA because the cruel treatment he would receive in the United States of America would be incompatible with his fragile state of health.
The BRITISH have already subjected Assange to a regime of torture. In November 2019, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the Swiss Law Professor Nils Melzer, visited Assange and reported that his behavior was like a victim of psychological torture.
This shameful picture shows Julian Assange being removed from the Embassy of Ecuador by British policemen.
Assange found sanctuary in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for seven years from 2012 until he was arrested by British police in April 2019. Assange had been facing extradition to Sweden on allegations of sexual assault, which he denied. That case was later dropped – and for many people the rape charges appeared patently ridiculous from the very beginning, a political stitch-up by the Swedish security service to bring Assange to a country from where extradition would be easy for the US.
The Americans apparently told Judge Baraitser that although he could be sentenced to 175 years, he would probably get 4-6 years. The English justice system jailed Mr Assange for 50 weeks in May 2019 for breaching his bail conditions. Since he entered the the Ecuadorian Embassy in June 2012 in order to avoid extradition, Assange has confined: in effect he has been in prison for eight and a half years, simply because American officials did not like his Wikileaks journalism which revealed embarrassing documents. Mainly they were embarrassing, because they revealed war crimes committed by the US army. After more than 8 years of confinement, it seems reasonable to give him his freedom NOW.
For the past 20 months, Assange – convicted of no crime and, in my opinion, guilty of no crime other than journalism that embarrassed powerful people and institutions - has been kept in solitary confinement in Belmarsh top security prison.
What did Assange actually do? He published on Wikileaks ‘confidential’ documents (including video of American soldiers in Iraq deliberately killing two journalists working for Reuters) that were leaked by American citizens horrified by the behavior of their government. Some of us believe that Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are heroes for revealing U.S. war crimes – crimes for which the army perpetrators were never judged.
Instead of justice for victims of war crimes, it is the whistleblowers and journalists who have been persecuted. Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning has been tortured and still in prison despite judges’ instructions of to release her. Snowden is exiled in Russia where he has found asylum.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has offered Assange asylum in Mexico. He welcomed last Monday’s judicial decision blocking Assange’s extradition to the US, because of the risk of suicide in a American jail. “Assange is a journalist and he deserves an opportunity,” Lopez Obrador said in his daily press conference. “I’m in favor of pardoning him. We’ll give him protection.”
Julian Assange with his partner Stella Morris, a South African lawyer who is the mother of his two children.
Compare this to the other pictures, and the effect of confinement on his health becomes
Assange is held in solitary confinement – which effectively means that his is being mentally tortured by the British authorities. He is reportedly close to suicidal, which is the main reason that the British Judge refused extradition.
On 20th December 2012 the Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Macguire wrote, after visiting Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy: “Mr. Assange is right to be concerned about the dangers of extradition to USA. American media has reported that the US Justice Department and the Pentagon have been conducting a criminal investigation into ‘whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange violated criminal laws in the groups release of government documents including possible charges under the espionage act’. Mr. Assange’s only crime is that he embarrassed the USA and powerful governments with WikiLeaks release of thousands of US state department cables and of the video footage from an apache helicopter of a 2007 incident in which the US military appears to have deliberately killed civilians, including two Reuters employees, revealing USA’s Crimes against humanity. For this truth telling he has inherited the wrath of the US government, and has been targeted in a most vindictive way – as has American soldier, pt. Bradley Manning, currently undergoing a military Court hearing for allegedly leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks.”
The current British Government was not the regime that began to persecute Assange: Mrs May is no longer Home Secretary, and the decision by the current Home Secretary Rt Hon Mrs Priti Patel M.P. to release Assange would actually hurt nobody. It would show compassion. It would right a great wrong.
FREE the journalist Julian Assange! Our politicians and policemen should listen to the Judge’s assessment of Julian Assange’s mental health, and set him free.
Dear Home Secretary,
Public.Enquiries@homeoffice.gov.uk
Please, Mrs Patel, it is time to leave Mr Assange in peace. Liberate him NOW, and allow him and his partner Stella Morris, the mother of his small children, to find ways to recover from the last eight years of persecution, isolation, and mental torture for which you personally had no responsibility.
Do I like Assange? No. Do I admire him? No. But journalism and the revelation of truth are essential to freedom and democracy. Mrs May and her American allies have behaved like medieval tyrants in the case of these whistleblowers, and it is time to admit that Britain got it wrong in its persecution of Julian Assange. This is what he looks like after 8 years of confinement. Enough is ENOUGH!
