WITHbetween pandemic, Brexit and Trump aftermath, it seems strange to see Julian Assange reappear as a topic in the news stream. The heyday of “hacktivism” was a good decade ago, names like Wikileaks, Edward Snowden, LulzSec or Anonymous look like clips from the first season of “Mr. Robot ”, stored in the“ Recent History ”folder, ready to be burned onto an archive medium.
Legally, the Assange case is a time bomb because it calls into question the relationship between the state and journalism in Western democracies. The Swiss lawyer Nils Melzer, UN special rapporteur on torture, wants to put the fate of the co-founder of Wikileaks back on the current agenda with his book “The Julian Assange Case”.
Psychological injuries
He describes how he received an email from Assange’s lawyers in December 2018 with a request for support, visiting Assange in the company of a doctor and a psychologist in the British maximum security prison Belmarsh, where the latter asked him to leave to save his life. Melzer describes how Assange is housed – clean and correct – and how the prison staff deal with him. Outwardly, according to Melzer, Assange no longer has anything to do with the image that was established with the last widespread photos of him when he was arrested long-haired and neglected from the threshold of the Ecuadorian embassy in London.