On April 19, Julian Assange, founder and editor, of WikiLeaks has been a refugee in the Ecuadoream embassy in London for three years. The key issue in his extraordinary incarceration is justice. He has been charged with no crime.
The first Swedish prosecutor dismissed the misconduct allegations regarding two women in Stockholm in 2010.
The second Swedish prosecutor’s actions were and are demonstrably political. Until recently, she refused to come to London to interview Assange – then she said she was coming; then she cancelled her appointment.
It is a farce, but one with grim consequences for Assange should he dare step outside the Ecuadorean embassy. The US criminal investigation against him and WikiLeaks — for the “crime” of exercising a right enshrined in the US constitution, to tell unpalatable truths– is “unprecedented in scale and nature”, according to US documents. For this, he faces much of a lifetime in the hellhole of a US supermax should he leave the protection of Ecuador in London.
The Swedish allegations are no more than a sideshow to this — the SMS messages between the women involved, read by lawyers, alone would exonerate him. They refer to the accusations as “made up” by the police. In the police report one of the women says she was “railroaded” by the Swedish police. What a disgrace this is for Sweden’s justice system.
Julian Assange is a refugee under international law and he should be given right of passage by the British government out of the UK, to Ecuador. The nonsense about him “jumping bail” is just that — nonsense. If his extradition case went through the British courts today, the European Arrest Warrant would be thrown out and he would be a free man. So what is the British government trying to prove by its absurd police cordon around an embassy whose refuge Assange has no intention of giving up? Why don’t they let him go?
Why is a man charged with no crime having to spend three years in one room, without light, in the heart of London? The Assange case amplifies many truths, and one is the growing, global totalitarianism of Washington, regardless of who is elected president. I am often asked if I think Assange has been “forgotten”. It’s my experience that countless people all over the world, especially in Australia, his homeland, understand perfectly well the injustice being meted out to Julian Assange. They credit him and WikiLeaks with having performed an epic public service by informing millions about what the powerful plan for them behind their backs, the lies governments and their vested interests tell, the violence they initiate. The powerful and the corrupt loathe this, because it is true democracy in action.
