IBAHRI condemns UK treatment of Julian Assange in US extradition trial

On the 10th March 2020 IBAHRI issued the notice

The International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI) condemns the reported mistreatment of Julian Assange during his United States extradition trial in February 2020, and urges the government of the United Kingdom to take action to protect him. According to his lawyers, Mr Assange was handcuffed 11 times; stripped naked twice and searched; his case files confiscated after the first day of the hearing; and had his request to sit with his lawyers during the trial, rather than in a dock surrounded by bulletproof glass, denied.

The UK hearing, which began on Monday 24 February 2020 at Woolwich Crown Court in London, UK, will decide whether the WikiLeaks founder, Mr Assange, will be extradited to the US, where he is wanted on 18 charges of attempted hacking and breaches of the 1917 Espionage Act. He faces allegations of collaborating with former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to leak classified documents, including exposing alleged war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. The hearing was adjourned after four days, with proceedings set to resume on 18 May 2020.

IBAHRI Co-Chair, the Hon Michael Kirby AC CMG, commented: ‘The IBAHRI is concerned that the mistreatment of Julian Assange constitutes breaches of his right to a fair trial and protections enshrined in the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, to which the UK is party. It is deeply shocking that as a mature democracy in which the rule of law and the rights of individuals are preserved, the UK Government has been silent and has taken no action to terminate such gross and disproportionate conduct by Crown officials. As well, we are surprised that the presiding judge has reportedly said and done nothing to rebuke the officials and their superiors for such conduct in the case of an accused whose offence is not one of personal violence. Many countries in the world look to Britain as an example in such matters. On this occasion, the example is shocking and excessive. It is reminiscent of the Abu Grahib Prison Scandal which can happen when prison officials are not trained in the basic human rights of detainees and the Nelson Mandela Rules.’

In accordance with the Human Rights Act 1998, which came into force in the UK in October 2000, every person tried in the UK is entitled to a fair trial (Article 6) and freedom from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment (Article 3). Similarly, Article 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights upholds an individual’s right to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal.

IBAHRI Co-Chair, Anne Ramberg Dr jur hc, commented: ‘The IBAHRI concurs with the widespread concern over the ill-treatment of Mr Assange. He must be afforded equality in access to effective legal representation. With this extradition trial we are witnessing the serious undermining of due process and the rule of law. It is troubling that Mr Assange has complained that he is unable to hear properly what is being said at his trial, and that because he is locked in a glass cage is prevented from communicating freely with his lawyers during the proceedings commensurate with the prosecution.’

A recent report from Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Inhumane Treatment, presented during the 43rd session of the UN Human Rights Council (24 February – 20 March 2020), argues that the cumulative effects of Mr Assange’s mistreatment over the past decade amount to psychological torture. If Mr Assange was viewed as a victim of psychological torture, his extradition would be illegal under international human rights law.

Read Original Notice

Commentary in UK Law Society

A note reveals exactly why the Julian Assange extradition case is based on lies

On 8th 2020 March, Tom Coburg wrote

During the extradition hearing, overseen by Judge Vanessa Baraitser at Belmarsh magistrates’ court in London, the prosecution alleged that by publishing unredacted secret US cables Assange had put lives in danger.

Political commentator and former UK ambassador Craig Murray attended the extradition hearing and published a summary. He observed that barrister Mark Summers QC for the defence explained how Assange and award-winning journalist Sarah Harrison warned the US State Department that they needed to act as lives were at risk:

Read whole article in The Canary

Roger Waters: Julian Assange being used as a warning to other journalists

On 7th March 2020 Tucker Carlson interviews Roger Waters

Catch interview on Fox News Tucker Carlson Tonight

Editor’s Note: This is included as might signal a break in the deafenning silence coverage of the hearings on US mainstream media. If this follows the Australian experience of last few weeks we can expect a solid flow on. The recent increases in take up of the petition may be facilitated by positive mainstream media coverage.

Urban Dictionary: Assange(v)

Assange

(v.): When a group of powerful people use organizations and/or states under their control to actively persecute, marginalize or imprison a dissident, whistleblower or journalist by using psychological torture, false accusations and manipulating vagaries in the laws of the involved nations and international treaties (Lawfare) to silence the individual.

The desired effect is to dissuade others from following in their footsteps and take attention away from embarrassing information, corruption or high level crimes exposed or publicly opposed by the person targeted.If you expose war crimes committed by the U.S. you risk being assanged.

by Eschatus February 29, 2020

Read in Urban Dictionary

Julian Assange and his Australian lawyers were secretly recorded in Ecuador’s London embassy

On 24th February 2020 Dylan Welch, Suzanne Dredge and Clare Blumer reported

Key points:

A security company embedded in the Ecuadorian embassy during Julian Assange’s residence is under investigation
Recordings and other surveillance were allegedly passed on to ‘American intelligence’, according to statements from former workers
Australian lawyers were among those surveilled in ‘Operation Hotel’

Four Corners – The US vs Julian Assange

Barrister Geoffrey Robertson shuffles into the entrance to Ecuador’s embassy in London, a camera recording the sound of his shoes echoing on the hard tiles.

It’s just after 7:00pm on January 12, 2018.

The camera rolls as Robertson stops at the front door, unbuttons his overcoat and removes his cap.

Once inside the embassy, other cameras follow him as he’s ushered into a meeting room, where the storied Queen’s Counsel is offered a cup of tea.

After a few minutes, he is greeted by the embassy’s most famous resident, Julian Assange.

The camera continues to roll, recording every word of the confidential legal conversation which follows.

While this may be typical surveillance at a secure diplomatic property, what Robertson did not know was he and a handful of other lawyers, were allegedly being targeted in a remarkable and deeply illegal surveillance operation possibly run at the request of the US Government.

And recordings such as Robertson’s visit are at the heart of concerns about the surveillance: privileged legal conversations between lawyer and client in a diplomatic residence were recorded and, later, accessed from IP addresses in the United States and Ecuador.

Robertson was only one of at least three Australian lawyers and more than two dozen other legal advisers from around the world that were caught up in the surveillance operation.

Long-time WikiLeaks adviser Jennifer Robinson was one of the other Australian lawyers caught in the spying operation.

“It’s important that clients can speak frankly and freely in a confidential space with their lawyers in order to be able to protect themselves and ensure that they have the best possible legal strategy and that the other side does not have advance notice of it,” Robinson said.

Referring to a Spanish allegation that the US Government had advance notice of legal conversations in the embassy, she said: “That is … a huge and a serious breach of [Assange’s] right to a defence and a serious breach of his fair trial rights.”

. . .

The Law Council of Australia told the ABC the alleged surveillance operation was “deeply disturbing”.

“The allegations that Julian Assange’s conversations with his lawyer were being recorded are really serious,” the council’s president, Pauline Wright said.

“If you can’t have that full, frank discussion without fear that that’s being recorded and potentially released to the authorities … it erodes trust in the whole system.

“It goes to the heart of the client lawyer privilege.”

Read whole article in the ABC News

Editors Note: The spying story was breaking in El Pais (Spain) in September 2019. This article raised 500,000 views on its first day and expected to pass 1 million on the second. I also offers insight into the legal ramifications and signals a positive change of attitude to Julian’s predicament in main stream media in Australia.

Absurd claims of Julian Assange being Russian tool only made to justify Hillary’s loss to Trump

On 5th March 2020 RT News interviewed John Shipton

Julian Assange published the DNC leaks in 2016 not because of links to Russia, but because he was always longing for truth, John Shipton said as he recalled key moments of his son’s life in an interview with RT Documentary.

Claims by the US intelligence services that Assange received the leaked 2016 Democratic National Committee emails directly from the Kremlin are “absurd,” Shipton said.

WikiLeaks published the files, which revealed the DNC’s bias against candidate Bernie Sanders and eventually cost Hillary Clinton dearly in the presidential race against Donald Trump. At the time, Assange was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

While in the embassy, Julian was “the most surveyed person on the planet,” with anybody entering the facility photographed and recorded by both the British and Ecuadorian secret services. Under such circumstances, it’s just “impossible” to imagine that he could’ve had any contacts with the Russian intelligence, Shipton pointed out.

Shipton said that accusations of his son’s links to Russia were the same as “the Skripal poisoning – another ridiculous MI6 scandal”. Former double agent Sergey Skripal and his daughter were allegedly poisoned with a nerve agent in Salisbury, UK in 2018, with Britain swiftly blaming Russia for the incident, but never bothering to provide any convincing proof for it.

Read complete article in RT News

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Prosecution of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange violates First Amendment

On 29th February Judge Andrew P. Napolitano writes

“Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech.” — First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

In the oral argument of the famous U.S. Supreme Court cases known collectively as the Pentagon Papers Case, the late Justice William O. Douglas asked a government lawyer if the Department of Justice views the “no law” language in the First Amendment to mean literally no law. The setting was an appeal of the Nixon administration’s temporarily successful efforts to bar The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing documents stolen from the Department of Defense by Daniel Ellsberg

. .

Yet the whole purpose of the First Amendment is to assure open, wide, robust debate about the government, free from government interference and threats. How can that debate take place in darkness and ignorance?

If “no law” doesn’t really mean no law, we are deluding ourselves, and freedom is not reality. It is merely a wished-for fantasy.

Read whole article in
Fox News
Winchester Star

Assange is being treated like a top terrorist – Sevim Dagdelen, member of German Bundestag (E851)

On 2nd March 2020

We speak to Left party member of the German Bundestag Sevim Dagdelen after she witnessed Julian Assange’s extradition trial. She discusses his treatment in the court, the bias of the judges, and WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson being temporarily banned from viewing the proceedings. She also invited Keir Starmer to witness the extradition trial. Next, we speak to Buglife CEO Matt Shardlow about the growing threat of the extinction of insects worldwide. He discusses lobbying efforts by insecticide companies and how they will affect post-Brexit Britain, the continued prevalence of harmful insecticides in the EU and around the world, the crisis of the extinction of bees and more!

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Julian Assange Show Trial: U.S. and UK in the Dock

On 28th February 2020

The extradition trial for journalist and publisher Julian Assange is nothing but a travesty. His brutal persecution by American and British authorities is a shocking indictment of these Western states and their hypocritical pretensions about professing democratic rights and rule of law.

Assange may be the one sitting in the dock. But the whole world can see that it is not he who is really on trial, but rather the so-called authorities who are persecuting him.

The 48-year-old Australian-born founder of Wikileaksis being prosecuted for one simple reason. He exposed war crimes and global corruption perpetrated by the U.S. government and its Western allies. The abysmal fate he finds himself in stems from that concise truth.

Ever since Assange published war crimes committed by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010-2011, he has been hounded for revenge. Despite confinement for seven years at an embassy in London, seeking asylum, Assange went on to expose more colossal corruption such as illegal global spying against governments and citizens by the U.S. state. For these “crimes”, he has been hunted down, mercilessly.

In order to conceal the travesty, the American government is demanding that Assange be extradited from Britain to face criminal charges of espionage and computer hacking. If he is extradited, which will be decided after further court hearings in Britain later this year, Assange could be facing 175 years in prison. This week was the opening of the extradition trial.

The legal arguments and procedural abuses against Assange are “beyond caricature”, as former British diplomat Craig Murray points out. Murray and many other public supporters of Assange attended the court hearings this week. His informed commentaries are a must-read.

From the opening day, it was clear that the journalist would not receive a fair trial. Before attending court he had been cuffed and strip-searched several times on his way to the hearing from the maximum-security prison, Belmarsh Category A Prison, near London, where he has been held in solitary confinement for nearly a year. Assange, an intelligent, placid truth-teller, is being treated like a dangerous terrorist. That appalling circumstance alone tells any casual observer what is really going on.

The overt bias and hostility to the defendant from the sitting judge, Vanessa Baraitser, makes it obvious that there is no due process for Assange. His guilty verdict in her eyes is a foregone conclusion. The fact that Assange was confined to a glass-fronted dock during the whole week of hearings, unable to communicate with his defense team, and ordered, imperiously, to sit down several times by the judge whenever he tried to protest the absurd circumstances, demonstrates beyond any doubt that this is not a fair trial. It is a show trial.

The legal proceedings against Assange have the same aura as Alice in Wonderland. As Craig Murray and other observers have commented, the prosecution case is replete with contradictions, irrationality and irrelevancies, an edifice of make-believe that his shored up by vindictive prejudice and caprice.

If there were any justice, the case against Assange should be thrown out immediately. But no, it trundles on under the guise of legal gravitas and evident collusion between the American and British authorities. Because the objective is to crush Assange for daring to expose the war crimes, crimes against humanity and the rank global corruption out of Washington and London.

This is not just about a vendetta against one individual. The consequence of the inquisition unfolding against Assange is the destruction of any vestige of fundamental democratic rights that citizens in the U.S. and Britain presume to possess. If Assange is extradited, then what is at stake is freedom of speech and the basic right to due legal process. Without such cardinal rights, the foundation of democracy is obsolete.

We have reached the point in history where the perpetrators of criminal wars and monstrous crimes explicitly view themselves as above the law. They have impunity to destroy nations and kill millions of innocents. Julian Assange should be venerated for exposing the crimes through his courageous and ethical journalism. The torture and persecution he is being subjected to show how degenerate supposed democratic governments have become. Anyone who dares to expose these perpetrators and their systematic crimes will be likewise liable for the same punishment as Assange.

A particularly disturbing – and yet revealing – aspect this week was the near-total silence among Western mainstream news media about the Assange case. None of the major U.S. or British news outlets gave any reporting on the trial – despite the shocking abuse of due process and the immensity of nefarious implications for democratic rights.

Julian Assange, his colleagues at Wikileaks and brave whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden all worked for the public good and the truth by exposing history-making corruption by the U.S. and British governments. They did this in a way that the corporate-controlled news media in those countries abjectly failed to do. Their silence about his persecution is thus their shame.

The American and British states and their obedient media tools have been – and are being – laid bare by the struggle of Julian Assange. Millions of people around the world are rallying to demand his freedom.

Thanks to Assange, they are seeing that the would-be emperors and their fawning media lackeys have no clothes; that these would-be emperors are stripped bare from their presumed moral authority, and are naked in their lies and hypocrisies.

Follow article in the Strategic Culture Foundation

The Age: The only questions that should matter in the Assange extradition battle

On the 29th February 2020 Elizabeth Farrelly writes

Even in my bleakest moments I’m glad I’m not Julian Assange. Seven years trapped inside the embassy opposite Harrods, with fake news in the air and police in the bushes. (Yes, I was there. I saw them). That alone would send me mad.

Follow that with 10 months’ solitary in what former British diplomat Craig Murray calls Britain’s Lubyanka, the ultra-grim high-security Belmarsh Prison. There, Assange has been subject to such harassment, arbitrariness, strip searches and abuse that both the UN Special Rapporteur and a group of more than 60 British doctors were impelled to protest his “torture” and his fellow inmates petitioned for his release from solitary. And now a bizarre hearing-cum-trial-by-public-opinion ending in possible extradition, a potential 175-year penalty and likely death in a harsh foreign jail. Why? For telling the truth.

. . .

On day two, Assange’s defence, Edward Fitzgerald QC, said the prosecution must prove three things: that Assange had helped Manning decode a hash key necessary to hack classified material, that Assange had solicited the material from Manning and that he had knowingly put lives at risk. There is, said Fitzgerald, no evidence on any of these counts, some of which were disproved in Manning’s court-martial. And the prosecution has admitted it cannot prove harm.

But even that is not the point. No one should be arguing the substantive case here. For now, the questions are; is this a political crime? Should Assange receive a fair trial? Does anyone believe he’ll get one in Trump’s America? And do we really think, given his poor health, he would survive prison there? The answers have to be yes, yes, no and, resoundingly, no.

Read whole article or watch news report in
The Age
The Sydney Morning Herald