Lawyers and legal academics are calling on the UK Government to end extradition proceedings against Australian Wikileaks founder, editor and activist Julian Assange and release him from prison.
Mr Assange is fighting against extradition to the US to face 17 charges under the Espionage Act and conspiracy to commit computer intrusion after he published hundreds of thousands of classified documents in 2010 and 2011 when he came to international attention. His leaks provided by US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These included the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video, the Afghanistan war logs and Iraqi war logs and many more. As a result, US government launched a criminal investigation into Wikileaks, which he founded.
The letter to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Justice Secretary Robert Buckland, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and Home Secretary Priti Patel is signed by 169 individuals and legal organisations. Among those calling for the UK government to intervene are Professor Vaios Koutroulis, professor of Public International Law from the University of Brussels, Belgium. Law groups signing the letter are the American Association of Jurists – AAJ, consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council, the Center for Constitutional Rights – CCR, USA, the European Association of Lawyers for Democracy and World Human Rights – ELDH and many more.
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Mr Assange is currently incarcerated in HM Prison Belmarsh, reportedly in ill health. Lawyers4Assange pinpoint the unlawful nature of the extradition of Mr Assange due to failure to ensure the protection of his “fundamental trial rights in the US”. The letter states that Mr Assange faces show trial at the “infamous Espionage court of the Eastern District of Virginia, before which no national security defendant has ever succeeded. Here, he faces secret proceedings before a jury picked from a population in which most of the individuals eligible for jury selection work for, or are connected to, the CIA, NSA, DOD or DOS.”
The lawyers express their collective concerns about the violations of Mr Assange’s “fundamental human, civil and political rights and the precedent his persecution is setting”.
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They call on the British government to act in accordance with national and international law, human rights and the rule of law by bringing an end to the ongoing extradition proceedings and granting Mr Assange “his long overdue freedom – freedom from torture, arbitrary detention and deprivation of liberty, and political persecution.”