Julian Assange: December court dates

On 12 Dec 2019, 11:01, Bridges for Media Freedom < bridges4media@riseup.net> wrote:

Email: contact@bridgesforfreedom.media
MEDIA ADVISORY
** We have been advised that the 20 December interview will be
conducted in private. Media and public will not be admitted. **
Julian Assange: December court dates
WHEN: Friday 13 December, Thursday 19 December and Friday 20 December
WHERE: Westminster Magistrates’ Court, 181 Marylebone Road, London NW1
WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who is fighting extradition to the
United States in an unprecedented Espionage Act prosecution for
journalistic activity, will be appearing in person at Westminster
Magistrates’ Court on Friday 20 December.
The purpose of this hearing is to further a Spanish criminal case
concerning extensive surveillance conducted at Ecuador’s London
embassy. Julian Assange lived at the Ecuadorian embassy for close to
seven years as an asylee until his expulsion and arrest on 11 April
2019.
Prosecutors in the Spanish case allege that video and audio recordings
of legal meetings conducted within the Ecuadorian Embassy were shared
with the United States.
Assange will appear in person at Westinster Magistrates’ Court to be
interviewed as a witness to these events. The interview will be
conducted by Judge José de la Mata at Spain’s National Court in Madrid,
participating by videolink.
A case management hearing in the extradition proceedings has been
scheduled for Thursday 19 December, also at Westminster Magistrates’
Court. An earlier hearing on Friday 13 December is expected to be
entirely administrative and will confirm that Assange remains in
custody at HMP Belmarsh, where he is detained on the medical ward.
Assange will participate in both of these hearings by videolink.
Concerns for Julian Assange’s welfare have grown since his disoriented
appearance at a case management hearing on 21 October. Last month, UN
Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer renewed his warning that
Assange’s life is at risk. [1] An open letter from 60 medical
professionals called for Assange’s transfer to a university teaching
hospital. [2]
Notes
[1]
https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=25249&LangID=
[2]
https://bridgesforfreedom.media/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Letter_from_medical_doctors_re_Mr_Julian_Assange_22_Nov_2019_EMBARGO_TILL_MIDNIGHT_NOVEMBER_24.pdf
—
Bridges for Media Freedom

Michael Rubbo “Lest we Regret”

I’ve called this film, Lest we Regret, because I’m convinced that if Julian Assange dies in prison or is extradited to the US, Australia will feel massive regret and guilt that his own country did so little to save him. I address the film to MPs of all parties and to all Australians.

Our image of ourselves as a fair and caring country, is already damaged and that many already regret. But Assange is in a different category because abandoning him, is tantamount to abandoning our commitment to the free flow of information which WikiLeaks has so effectively enabled. Millions of documents have been released and not one has proved to be fake news. It’s an amazing achievement as is the fact that no one has been hurt by these releases, only the powerful massively embarrassed.
I’ve tried to make the film mainstream. I come in through the curious connection to a time in 1966 when Queen Elizabeth felt great remorse for her failure to respond to a tragedy in Wales. I’m figuring that many of the MPs who we need to see join the excellent initiative of Andrew Wilkie, are Coalition members who, hopefully, will be intrigued by my approach.
I then go on to counter the conventional idea that Assange is somehow disreputable. I take my audience to his most famous release, the collateral murder video from 2010, and show that the way he handled that horrific material was so sincere, so admirable, so unlike the information anarchist he’s been painted to be, that hopefully a new appraisal of him emerges in the minds of the viewer. Our National regret will be even more painful when the Australian public realises what a hero they have abandoned. Regret is a very serious business. We hear of people in war who have done terrible things, such as we see in the collateral murder video, and are haunted for the rest of their lives. Australia will be haunted to its core if it abandons Julian Assange to an unjust fate.

Assange and the Myth of Due Process

Edited by: Tim Zubizarreta

JURIST Guest Columnists Greg Barns, an Australian Lawyer and Adviser to the Australian Assange Campaign, and Lisanne Adam, a legal academic and Consultant in EU Human Rights, discuss how despite modern nations’ commitment to due process, Julian Assange is being denied due process at every turn…

…

In the case of the digital Robin Hood, Assange informed voices such as the United Nations special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer and Bloomberg columnist Leonid Bershidsky argue that the likelihood that his case is considered by an impartial and unbiased judiciary and jury, is minimal or nil.

More specifically a premise of due process Audi Alteram Partem, is not guaranteed in the case of Assange. Audi Alteram Partem is a universally accepted due process guarantee that protects an individual against unfair governmental practices in the sense that it provides equal arms during criminal proceedings. In Brady v. Maryland, this right was emphasised to be about fundamentally protecting individuals from prosecutorial misconduct in withholding evidence. Equality of arms is an elemental safeguard against arbitrary treatment and an integral part of the scheme in it that it prescribes a range of minimum standards protecting parties’ equality.

But in Assange’s case earlier this year, US prosecutors obtained Assange’s legal defence strategy, medical records and other personal belongings from the Ecuadorian Embassy. This was an unlawful confiscation, a clear case of prosecutorial misconduct, that has been left unscrutinised by the UK judiciary through its allowing for the extradition proceedings to commence without further delay.

In the same vein, equality of arms also underpins the right to engage counsel and prepare a defence. The right to effective legal representation is undeniably a constituent of fundamental fairness. This right necessitates effective access to counsel and documents needed to prepare a defence effectively. Restriction of these rights enhance a disturbing departure from due process in it that it creates inequality of parties in proceedings.

Read full article in the Jurist

The German Association of Journalists opposes the extradition of whistleblower and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from Great Britain to the USA

Germany’s largest Journalist Union’s statement
(Machine translation)

The German Association of Journalists opposes the extradition of whistleblower and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from Great Britain to the USA. Assange, whose health is said to have deteriorated rapidly, is currently serving a prison sentence in the UK for violating probationary conditions. The US authorities then demand his extradition to charge him with publishing secret government documents. “Assange’s stay at the London embassy in Ecuador was in fact already several years in prison,” says DJV Federal Chairman Frank Überall. The world public owes the whistleblower comprehensive information and insights into government machinations that would otherwise never have come to light. The surveillance of journalists in the London Embassy of Ecuador, where Julian Assange had been a refuge for years, was also scandalous. According to NDR information, three of the station’s journalists were spied on when they visited Assange at the embassy. The station has filed a complaint. “The journalists concerned have the right to know what information was siphoned off and with what justification this happened,”

Read original article [in German] at DEUTSCHER JOURNALISTEN-VERBAND

What the C.I.A.’s Torture Program Looked Like to the Tortured

Editor’s Note: Julian Assange has expressed fear he will not receive fair treatment if extradited to the US. These fears have been dismissed out of hand by the UK legal system. This article provides substance to those fears.

Carol Rosenberg writes

They are sketches drawn in captivity by the Guantánamo Bay prisoner known as Abu Zubaydah, self-portraits of the torture he was subjected to during the four years he was held in secret prisons by the C.I.A.

Published here for the first time, they are gritty and highly personal depictions that put flesh, bones and emotion on what until now had sometimes been portrayed in popular culture in sanitized or inaccurate ways: the so-called enhanced interrogations techniques used by the United States in secret overseas prisons during a feverish pursuit of Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In each illustration, Mr. Zubaydah — the first person to be subject to the interrogation program approved by President George W. Bush’s administration — portrays the particular techniques as he says they were used on him at a C.I.A. black site in Thailand in August 2002.

They demonstrate how, more than a decade after the Obama administration outlawed the program — and then went on to partly declassify a Senate study that found the C.I.A. lied about both its effectiveness and its brutality — the final chapter of the black sites has yet to be written.

Mr. Zubaydah, 48, drew them this year at Guantánamo for inclusion in a 61-page report, “How America Tortures,” by his lawyer, Mark P. Denbeaux, a professor at the Seton Hall University School of Law in Newark, and some of Mr. Denbeaux’s students.

Read complete article in The New York Times

Enhanced Interrogation Technique: the history and perpetrators explained in Wikipedia

Kerry O’Brien uses Walkey Awards speech to rally journalists, saying press ‘freedom is eroded gradually’

Former 7.30 host Kerry O’Brien has called for journalists to unite to protect press freedoms in a powerful opening speech for the Walkley Awards for Excellence in Journalism.

O’Brien warned about the dangers of restricted press, saying it could lead to fascism
He said journalists need to call out any abuses of power
O’Brien also called on the Government to work to bring Julian Assange back to Australia

The Walkley Foundation presented WikiLeaks, with Assange is its editor, an award for its outstanding contribution to journalism in 2011.

Judges said Assange used new technology to “penetrate the inner workings of government to reveal an avalanche of inconvenient truths in a global publishing coup”.

WikiLeaks in 2010 published classified military and diplomatic files about US bombing campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Kerry O’Brien said “As we sit here tonight, Julian Assange is mouldering in a British prison awaiting extradition to the United States, where he may pay for their severe embarrassment with a life in prison,” O’Brien said.

“This Government could demonstrate its commitment to a free press by using its significant influence with its closest ally to gain his return to Australia.”

Read full article in ABC News

Rick Morton writes “Saving Julian Assange”

23rd November 2019

On Monday afternoon, an unlikely group of federal politicians will meet for the first time in Parliament House to strategise how they can bring home a man most of them concede is arrogant, deeply unlikeable and perhaps even worse.

The Parliamentary Friends of the Bring Julian Assange Home Group is a strange collection of sometime adversaries. Founded by Tasmanian independent Andrew Wilkie, it is co-chaired by both him and regional Queensland MP George Christensen. Wilkie describes their coming together as almost cosmic.

“It sort of happened organically; it was a bit like the Big Bang,” he says.

“Regrettably, Julian’s case has not been so much about the law, as it has become a political football. But this also provides an opportunity for a political solution.”

. . .

Joyce, Wilkie and Christensen will be joined at the table on Monday by independent Zali Steggall, Centre Alliance’s Rebekha Sharkie and Rex Patrick, Labor’s Julian Hill and Steve Georganas, and Greens MPs Peter Whish-Wilson and Adam Bandt. They will be briefed by Julian Assange’s London-based lawyer Jennifer Robinson and Australian barrister Greg Barns.

“The Australian government faces a very stark choice. Are they prepared to see an Australian citizen hunted down by the Trump administration to face 175 years in prison? Or are we prepared to do what we did in the David Hicks case, which is to say, ‘No, he is one of ours’ and stand up to them,” Barns tells The Saturday Paper.

What the group doesn’t have yet, as far as membership, is anyone from the Liberal Party. While Barns is set to meet with some Liberal MPs next week, he won’t name names.

. . .

Barns thinks this is starting to change. “Like the Hicks case, these issues often take time to develop and I think there is increasing concern now in the Australian community that Julian is effectively facing the death penalty,” he says.

“The most immediate issue for us is Julian’s mental and physical health and his inability to prepare properly for his case. He is being held in an inhumane environment.”

A bright spot, says Barns, is that Assange has now received consular assistance from the Australian government.

Read full article in The Saturday Paper

Rudd says Assange faces ‘unacceptable’ and ‘disproportionate’ punishment

Rob Harris writes 26th November 2019

Kevin Rudd says Julian Assange would pay an “unacceptable” and “disproportionate” price if he is extradited to the United States, arguing the WikiLeaks founder should not take the fall for Washington’s failures to secure its own classified documents.

In a significant intervention into Mr Assange’s extradition fight, the former Australian prime minister said US prosecutors had not made any specific allegations that anyone was seriously harmed as a consequence of the release of highly classified documents relating to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2010.

A newly established cross-party group of federal MPs met in Canberra for the first time on Monday [25/11/2019], agreeing to pressure for the US’s extradition request to be dropped and for Mr Assange to be allowed to return to Australia.

. . .

The group’s co-chairs, independent MP Andrew Wilkie and Nationals MP George Christensen, are seeking to lead a parliamentary delegation visit Mr Assange in Belmarsh prison in coming months.

The group was briefed by barrister Jen Robinson, a member of Mr Assange’s London legal team, as well as Greg Barns from the Australian Assange Campaign and human rights and due process advocate Aloysia Brooks.

Read full article in The Sydney Morning Herald

Anthony Galloway writes “‘Psychological torture’: Pamela Anderson’s direct plea to Scott Morrison”

Pamela Anderson says Julian Assange is facing “psychological torture” in a British jail as doctors have raised fresh concern about the WikiLeaks founder’s health.

Anderson said Mr Morrison did not have to do anything special for Assange, “just do the same as your party’s predecessor did” with Mr Ricketson, who was given a royal pardon after 15 months in a Cambodian prison on espionage charges.

“Do as your previous leader did for James Ricketson. Pick up the phone and save an Australian hero.

Pick up the phone and call President [Donald] Trump and call Prime Minister [Boris] Johnson and tell them to do their part to save the people’s democratic right in the Western world and free Julian Assange.

Silence is complicity when faced with the onset of tyranny and the destruction of human rights as this case symbolises in the highest order.”

Read full article The Age

60 DOCTORS WRITE OPEN LETTER WARNING JULIAN ASSANGE ‘COULD DIE IN PRISON’

More than 60 doctors from United States, Australia, Britain, Sweden, Italy, Germany, Sri Lanka, Poland have written to Priti Patel, the UK’s Home Secretary.

“We write this open letter, as medical doctors, to express our serious concerns about the physical and mental health of Julian Assange.
Mr Assange requires urgent expert medical assessment of both his physical and psychological state of health.
We have real concerns, on the evidence currently available, that Mr Assange could die in prison. The medical situation is thereby urgent. There is no time to lose.”

The doctors are calling for Julian Assange to be moved from Belmarsh prison in London to a university teaching hospital

Read articles in The Guardian and ABC News

Read about previous medical warnings Julian Assange’s health in ‘dangerous’ condition, say doctors