MAPW President Dr Sue Wareham is speaking at the global #DayX rally and vigil in support of Julian Assange.
Assange’s legal team is staging a last-ditch legal challenge to stop the journalist’s extradition from Britain to the United States on espionage charges.
MAPW has been staunchly in support of Julian Assange, whose Wikileaks platform published vital information about illegal and harmful conduct in war.
The public has a right to know about crimes committed ‘in our name’, and the persecution of journalists is a threat to democracy.
Day X events are streaming live on YouTube.
Read MAPW’s 2022 piece on Assange in Croakey Health Media.
Read MAPW’s 2011 compilation What has Wikileaks Revealed?
This speech was delivered by Dr Sue Wareham, Canberra, 20 February 2024.
Here we are again to speak out for justice for Julian Assange and for the protection of press freedoms. And our message today is particularly directed to one of the nations that constantly talks about freedom and democracy, one of Australia’s partners in AUKUS that preach freedom and democracy – the UK. We’re here to tell the UK to start practising and defending democratic freedoms rather than preaching them.
In March last year, the leaders of Australia, the US and the UK, in announcing the nuclear submarines for Australia, said:
‘We believe in a world that protects freedom and respects human rights, the rule of law, the independence of sovereign states, and the rules-based international order.’
- On human rights – do human rights allow the UK to lock up someone for years on end, most of it in solitary confinement, without even charging them with anything, all for the benefit of another nation that’s persecuting them?
- On the independence of sovereign states – does this allow the UK to override the wishes of the Australian parliament in relation to an Australian citizen?
- On the rules-based international order – how on earth can this be achieved when those who publish evidence of grievous violations, such as Assange’s Wikileaks organisation, are locked away as a warning to others?
Right now we hear your sanctimonious words about the death in Russia of the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny. And to be clear, yes, Navalny’s death raises grave concerns about political repression in Russia. But the UK claims to be above all that. Your foreign minister David Cameron said on Saturday “There should be consequences when appalling human rights outrages like this take place”. He continued “What we do is we look at whether there are individual people that are responsible and whether there are individual actions that we can take.”
In the case of Assange, the action that the UK can take is obvious – stop your appalling complicity in this sordid saga of Asange’s persecution, and as an immediate step refuse to extradite him to the US.
Ditto to the US: put your own house in order and then you can criticise others. President Biden has stated that ‘A free press is essential to the health of a democracy.’ Why then does the US persecute journalists who depend on a free press to do their work?
The persecution of Assange does not stop at locking him up in a solitary cell. In 2021 it was revealed that the CIA had plotted to poison or kidnap Assange in 2017 when we was still in the Ecuadorian Embassy, with these discussions occurring “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration.
There is the factor of Julian Assange’s very poor health, which has suffered from incarceration in Belmarsh prison for nearly 5 years and a likely deterioration if he were to be extradited:
Human rights lawyer Kellie Tranter has written in recent days in the publication Declassified Australia of the other risks that Assange faces if he is extradited – including the negligible chances of a fair trial, and the near certainty of serving a life sentence under brutal conditions.
But, Tranter says, he faces another risk there too – the possibility of the death sentence. In the US there are certain crimes under federal jurisdiction, including espionage, that can attract the death penalty, even if the state where the trial takes place does not have the death penalty. However UK law does not allow the extradition of a person to any jurisdiction where they may face the death penalty. How is the UK going to get around this, or is UK law there to be broken when it gets in the way?
A further question to the British government: do you respect the wishes of the Australian parliament in this matter? Does the vote in our parliament last week [14 Feb], in which our federal parliamentarians voted overwhelmingly to urge the US and the UK to allow Assange to return to Australia, mean anything, or does the Australian parlt have less say over what happens to our citizens than our allies do? Two-thirds of the members of the House of Representatives voted in favour of the resolution, including our Prime Minister.
At this point I want to stop to thank and congratulate on behalf of all of us Andrew Wilkie MP for introducing the motion last week on behalf of the Parliamentary Friends of Julian Assange and for the sterling efforts of him and other parliamentarians to see Julian Assange released.
In conclusion, we are witnessing the persecution by the US of a man whose publications exposed their own crimes. Justice is being turned on its head. And in all this the UK is complicit.
This has implications for us all. The attempts to destroy Assange are being used as an example to other journalists, the very people we rely on to know what is done in our name. It’s hard to think of anything more anti-democratic.
Sources used in this speech:
https://johnmenadue.com/critical-week-torture-us-jail-awaits-julian-assange/
https://johnmenadue.com/historic-vote-in-australian-parliament-on-julian-assange/