In a handful of days, by the end of February, the High Court of Justice of the United Kingdom will definitively express itself, according to the dictates of English law, whether to accept the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States or not. In these hours, appeals and initiatives in favor of freedom for Assange are multiplying in many European nations, and not only, including Italy.
Last February 6, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Alice Jill Edwards, appealed, with an exhortation to the United Kingdom, to definitively stop the possibility of extraditing Assange to the States, where the journalist, founder of WikiLeaks, is expected to be tried as an enemy of American national security. Edwards, more precisely, appealed to article 7 of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states that “no one may be subjected to torture, punishment or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”.
In addition to this, the special rapporteur also referred to article 3 of the UN Convention against torture (“no State shall expel, return or extradite a person to another State if there are serious reasons to believe that there is a risk of torture” ) and finally also to article 3 of the EU Convention on Human Rights which reiterates the same concept.
What did Julian Assange do to have provoked such a serious accusation against him by the United States? Assange, a journalist originally from Australia, as founder and editor of WikilLeaks made public thousands of secret documents on abuses perpetrated by the US army in Iraq and Afghanistan. The documentation WikiLeaks used consisted mainly of diplomatic cables and correspondence which, according to the Espionage Act of 1917, could not have been published even by a journalist.
According to the United States, no one in the world should have known what Guantanamo was like for the prisoners and so many other truly shocking situations that we only learned about thanks to WikiLeaks.
The charges against Assange, added together, lead to a prison sentence of 175 years, to be served in a maximum security prison, which, after a trial against him in Virginia in a state of prolonged isolation, could be that of ADX Florence in Colorado.
According to defense lawyers, including Julian’s own wife, Stella Moris (a criminal lawyer of South African origins), as well as some doctors, Assange has long suffered from a severe recurrent depressive syndrome which could push him to suicide in similar conditions, certainly worse than the maximum security prison in Belmarsh, in the suburbs of London, where Julian has been detained since April 2019, when he was physically taken away by British policemen from the premises of the Ecuadorian embassy, where he had received asylum since from 2012.
The rapporteur Edwards, who as we have reported raises doubts about the compatibility of Assange’s state of health with prison conditions in the event of extradition overseas, has therefore based her exhortations above all on the physical and mental evidence of Julian, who appears visibly in the rare images circulating very tried. The hearing (which should take place on 20 and 21 February) will therefore take stock of this aspect, after all in the previous British ruling of 2021, in first instance, the extradition request was rejected precisely due to Julian’s state of health.
As the journalist of Sardinian origins, Sara Chessa, author of the essay “Destroying Assange” (released in 2023 by Castelvecchi), points out, the Assange case is particularly significant regarding the desire to create incalculable damage to a man of flesh and bones, to destroy him psychologically and to discourage “the other Assanges” throughout the world, that is, the reporters who could share with him the ideal of public interest journalism. From London, where she lives and works, Chessa continues to document and follow the Assange affair punctually and has now become a point of reference, as the journalist Stefania Maurizi is in particular for Italy for those who continue to find out about this emblematic case . We also remember that on the political-diplomatic front, Australian Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is also working in favor of the release of Assange, as an Australian citizen.
Sara Chessa explained to us, in one of our recent meetings, that the Assange case must be examined in depth through two parallel battles, the judicial one and the diplomatic one and finally concluded: “If Assange is extradited, a very dangerous precedent will be created, under the judicial profile, for all the journalists who deal with hot dossiers, while from the point of view of mobilization by Julian’s supporters, there is a need for civil society to make itself heard much more”.
In this regard, we would like to point out that on February 15th in Rome (6.30 pm in via Monte Senario 83) a debate will take place to take stock of the Assange case. On this occasion it will also be possible to attend the screening of the documentary film Ithaka, produced and commissioned by Julian’s father and brother (John and Gabriel Shipton) and Julian’s wife, Stella Moris.
Photo (pda):
1) Stella Moris, wife of Julian Assange;
2) Julian’s father, John Shipton;
3) The sculpture by the Italian artist Davide Dormino showing an empty chair, the one on which the journalist Assange, detained in prison, should find himself climbing.
D.B.
