A letter of a Sydney barrister
Phillip Segal
emailed to 500+ barristers of NSW this day, November 8 2019
Dear Colleagues,
In February I will have been a legal practitioner for 50 years. Some half of that time has been defending Aboriginal people charged with criminal matters, and since 1996 as counsel defending those in the community at large.
I have never, and I mean never, had a client in custody presented to a court in the condition that Julian Assange appeared at his last appearance in England. Something is rotten, and it is not in Denmark.
Please contact me if you wish to discuss his situation.
We are practitioners in the front line. We do perhaps have a shared responsibility to act and speak in the interests of justice.
Regards,
Phillip Segal, barrister
Liability Limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards Legislation
By now, it has been well-documented how the UK police, prosecuting services, courts and prisons have squandered untold public resources on one individual who had skipped a police bail order seven years ago. Search a little deeper and we see countless precedentshave been set in the wake of a hunting expedition that is now slowly killing a journalist who exposed the crimes of powerful states. The abuse of power continues, with the recent attempt to block a Spanish judge from interviewing Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, which clearly demonstrates that the United Kingdom Central Authority (UKCA) is continuing the state’s assault on Assange as he fights extradition to the United States for exposing its war crimes.
The implications of CIA involvement in spying on Assange were made clear by Assange’s lawyer, Mark Summers, at Assange’s court hearing on 21st October, when he stated:
“The American state has been actively engaged in intruding on privileged discussions between Mr Assange and his lawyer.”
GENEVA (1 November 2019) – The UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, has expressed alarm at the continued deterioration of Julian Assange’s health since his arrest and detention earlier this year, saying his life was now at risk.
Nils Melzer reiterates
“However, what we have seen from the UK Government is outright contempt for Mr. Assange’s rights and integrity,” Melzer said. “Despite the medical urgency of my appeal, and the seriousness of the alleged violations, the UK has not undertaken any measures of investigation, prevention and redress required under international law.”
“Despite the complexity of the proceedings against him led by the world’s most powerful Government, Mr. Assange’s access to legal counsel and documents has been severely obstructed, thus effectively undermining his most fundamental right to prepare his defence”
“In my view, this case has never been about Mr. Assange’s guilt or innocence, but about making him pay the price for exposing serious governmental misconduct, including alleged war crimes and corruption. Unless the UK urgently changes course and alleviates his inhumane situation, Mr. Assange’s continued exposure to arbitrariness and abuse may soon end up costing his life.”
In his urgent appeal to the UK Government, the Special Rapporteur strongly recommended that Mr. Assange’s extradition to the United States be barred, and that he be promptly released and allowed to recover his health and rebuild his personal and professional life.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said that the Australian Government was providing consular assistance to Julian Assange, but he wouldn’t be given any ‘special treatment’.
O’Reilly dismissed this as bureaucratic newspeak. He said:
“The Australian Government hasn’t played any proactive role in advocating for his human rights: access to due process and free speech as a journalist.
There are huge issues involved in charging any journalist under the Espionage Act as even the Washington Post and the New York Times and Bob Carr are beginning to realise. This could be the end of journalism in relation to the military. Australia needs to lift its game and defend the human rights of its citizen Julian Assange.“
Passing a motion at its national conference today, the ALA resolved to call for the Australian Government to do all it can to bring Julian Assange back to Australia and to resist attempts by the US to extradite him.
“This is an important issue about the rule of law and protecting an Australian in a vulnerable position overseas,” said ALA national president, Mr Andrew Christopoulos.
The ALA is concerned about the reach of the charges brought against Mr Assange.
“This is about standing up for the rule of law, fairness and the freedom to expose wrong doing,” said Mr Christopoulos.
“An Australian citizen is abroad and we are concerned that his well-being is being compromised. The reported decline of Julian Assange’s physical and mental health heightens the need for urgent government intervention. The government has intervened in cases like this before and should do so in this circumstance.”
The Australian Lawyers Alliance is a national association of lawyers, academics and other professionals dedicated to protecting and promoting justice, freedom and the rights of the individual.
The Sydney Peace Foundation calls on the UK Government to refuse to extradite Julian Assange to the USA, where he is likely to face serious human rights violations in pre-trial detention.
The allegations of rape and other sexual violence against Julian Assange in Sweden should be properly investigated, and Assange should be brought to justice if convicted in a fair trial. If Sweden requests his extradition from the UK to proceed with legal action on the basis of these allegations, they should give assurances that he will not then be extradited to the USA.
Julian Assange was awarded the Foundation’s Gold Medal for Human Rights in 2011 for championing the people’s right to know, and for exceptional courage and initiative in pursuit of human rights.
But in 2013, the Obama DOJ concluded that it could not prosecute Assange in connection with the publication of those documents because there was no way to distinguish what WikiLeaks did from what the New York Times, The Guardian, and numerous media outlets around the world routinely do: namely, work with sources to publish classified documents.
The Obama DOJ tried for years to find evidence to justify a claim that Assange did more than act as a journalist — that he, for instance, illegally worked with Manning to steal the documents — but found nothing to justify that accusation and thus, never indicted Assange (as noted, the Obama DOJ since at least 2011 was well-aware of the core allegation of today’s indictment — that Assange tried to help Manning circumvent a password wall so she could use a different username — because that was all part of Manning’s charges).
So Obama ended eight years in office without indicting Assange or WikiLeaks. Everything regarding Assange’s possible indictment changed only at the start of the Trump administration. Beginning in early 2017, the most reactionary Trump officials were determined to do what the Obama DOJ refused to do: indict Assange in connection with publication of the Manning documents.
“It’s about the principle of someone who’s published information on the internet and fallen afoul of laws [in a country] that they’re not a citizen of, that they actually haven’t set foot in,” Mr Christensen said.
Going Underground speaks to legendary journalist and filmmaker John Pilger on Julian Assange’s latest extradition hearing this Monday, which he attended.
The worst moment was one of a number of ‘worst’ moments. I have sat in many courtrooms and seen judges abuse their positions, This judge, Vanessa Baraitser– actually she isn’t a judge at all; she’s a magistrate — shocked all of us who were there.
Her face was a progression of sneers and imperious indifference; she addressed Julian with an arrogance that reminded me of a magistrate presiding over apartheid South Africa’s Race Classification Board. When Julian struggled to speak, he couldn’t get words out, even stumbling over his name and date of birth.
When he spoke truth and when his barrister spoke, Baraister contrived boredom; when the prosecuting barrister spoke, she was attentive. She had nothing to do; it was demonstrably preordained. In the table in front of us were a handful of American officials, whose directions to the prosecutor were carried by his junior; back and forth this young woman went, delivering instructions.
The judge watched this outrage without a comment. It reminded me of a newsreel of a show trial in Stalin’s Moscow; the difference was that Soviet show trials were broadcast. Here, the state broadcaster, the BBC, blacked it out, as did the other mainstream channels.
Having ignored Julian’s barrister’s factual description of how the CIA had run a Spanish security firm that spied on him in the Ecuadorean embassy, she didn’t yawn, but her disinterest was as expressive. She then denied Julian’s lawyers any more time to prepare their case – even though their client was prevented in prison from receiving legal documents and other tools with which to defend himself.
Her knee in the groin was to announce that the next court hearing would be at remote Woolwich, which adjoins Belmarsh prison and has few seats for the public. This will ensure isolation and as close to a secret trial as it’s possible to get. Did this happen in the home of the Magna Carta? Yes, but who knew?
More Important Than Dreyfus
Julian’s case is often compared with Dreyfus; but historically it’s far more important. No one doubts — not his enemies on The New York Times, not the Murdoch press in Australia – that if he is extradited to the United States and the inevitable supermax, journalism will be incarcerated, too.
Who will then dare to expose anything of importance, let alone the high crimes of the West? Who will dare publish ‘Collateral Murder’? Who will dare tell the public that democracy, such as it is, has been subverted by a corporate authoritarianism from which fascism draws its strength.
Once there were spaces, gaps, boltholes, in mainstream journalism in which mavericks, who are the best journalists, could work. These are long closed now. The hope is the samidzat on the internet, where fine disobedient journalism is still practised. The greater hope is that a judge or even judges in Britain’s court of appeal, the High Court, will rediscover justice and set him free. In the meantime, it’s our responsibility to fight in ways we know but which now require more than a modicum of Assange courage.
John Pilger is an Australian journalist and BAFTA award-winning documentary film maker. He has been mainly based in the United Kingdom since 1962. http://johnpilger.com/
