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.
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Nils Melzer with Oliver Kobold: “The Julian Assange case”. Story of a persecution.
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Image: Piper Verlag
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The injuries inflicted on Assange are rather psychological in nature. A view that the responsible judge of Westminster Magistrates’ Court endorsed last January and refused to extradite the Australian to the United States because of the risk of suicide.
Ruthlessly dragged into the public eye
Melzer traces the way Assange got to this point from the acclaimed operator of the Wikileaks disclosure platform. He takes sides with Assange and accuses the authorities of the United States, Great Britain and Sweden of having subjected him to “white torture”, that is to say to the systematic psychological decomposition. His central argument: Assange had no choice but to evade persecution by the Swedish and British authorities by fleeing to the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012. The Swedes and British had nothing else in mind than to extradite him to the United States immediately after his arrest, where he was threatened with a show trial and torture-like conditions in a maximum security prison.
Even if that doesn’t sound implausible at all, Melzer cannot prove it, so he has to turn every clue against the law enforcement authorities. On the one hand, he emphasizes that the two Swedes, whose complaints with the police first started the proceedings against Assange, were ruthlessly dragged into the public, in order to then cover the most intimate details and legal formalities from the relationship of Spread women to Assange. In the end, the question will be whether Assange penetrated one of his admirers with a torn condom and the other while sleeping or half asleep, and which of his actions could have been punishable at which point in time.
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