Julian Assange’s future will be defined by the “political will” of UK officials, WikiLeaks founder Stella Assange’s wife said at a rally in London on Tuesday. After a series of legal defeats, the decision on the journalist’s extradition to the United States is in the hands of the Home Minister of the United Kingdom, Priti Patel.
The defense had until Wednesday (18) to present its arguments and then Patel will decide on the future of the journalist who led the effort that revealed the murder of civilians by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“They should block this extradition. It’s a political case and there’s a political solution, which is to end it now. Julian has done nothing wrong, he’s been put in a British prison, the UK is arresting a journalist,” Stella said. .
The lawyer also highlighted that at the same time that the United Kingdom asks for information about war crimes in Ukraine, it arrests Assange for revealing US war crimes. She called Assange’s plight the “press freedom case of the century”.
Using a World War I anti-espionage law, the United States is seeking Assange’s extradition in a process that began with President Donald Trump and continues with Democrat Joe Biden in the White House. If convicted, the journalist could face a sentence of more than a century behind bars.
Amnesty International criticizes US
Amnesty International says Assange’s possible extradition would be “devastating” to freedom of the press and the public. In a note at the end of April, the human rights organization says that the guarantees offered by the US authorities to guarantee the extradition of Australian Assange are flawed and can be reversed at any time.
“If the UK government allows a foreign country to exercise extraterritorial criminal jurisdiction to prosecute a person who publishes in the UK, other governments can use the same legal apparatus to arrest journalists and silence the press far beyond their own country’s borders.” , says Amnesty International in note.
The persecution of the WikiLeaks journalist is analyzed and dissected in the book “Assange: La Verdad Confiscada”, edited by Carol Proner and Pablo Gentili. In the work, a quote from the theorist Franz Himkelammert: “Human rights have become humanitarian aggression: violating the human rights of those who violate them. Behind this is another conviction that those who violate human rights do not have human rights. The violator of human rights is transformed into a monster, a beast that can be eliminated without the slightest question of human rights. It even loses the character of a human being.”
Editing: Arturo Hartmann
