After a British court ruled against the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador offered him political asylum in his country. From there Leopoldo Maldonado, Regional Director of ‘Article 19’ for Mexico and Central America, speaks to us.
Maldonado is surprised by that offer. “It seems more like a coup” from the president. But you have to take into account the context, he says, a backdrop of Mexico as “the most lethal country for the press according to the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders, even above countries at war like Syria and Afghanistan. ”.
In a country where a journalist is attacked every 11 hours, according to ‘Article 19’ records, and where violence against the dam increased by 45% in 2020, Maldonado believes that the first thing to do is “clean the house” and guarantee “a robust exercise of freedom of expression for the Mexican press”, although he celebrates that Mexico supports “its tradition of political asylum for the persecuted.”
The leak of more than 500,000 classified documents by Assange, many of them linked to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, “have caused an international scandal,” admits the director, but celebrates that they have also allowed us to know how diplomacy works and how war crimes are committed. Thus, Assange’s publications demonstrated, in his opinion, that “we need a more transparent global system and that there is an avidity of global society to scrutinize the acts of the powerful”.
Julian Assange faces 18 charges under the espionage law in the United States. For years, he has also faced enormous controversy over his figure. “He is a brilliant character, but he also has a lot of chiaroscuro”explains Maldonado. He is accused of being extremely authoritarian, of sexual harassment and rape of two women when he took refuge in Sweden.
Assange revealed that there is a whole system of espionage against political dissidents worldwide, Leopoldo Maldonado recalls, “but he is also the subject of espionage within the Ecuuador embassy.” That is why the founder of Wikileaks shows the “double face of the political system, a fight for transparency, accountability” … and brings to the table the debate about those who leak classified information to protect people’s fundamental rights, even giving rise to the protection of such information leakers as Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning being studied now.
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