Julian Assange. Source: Julian Assange & Martina Haris, Wikimedia Commons
On January 20th, the Belmarsh tribunal met in Washington D.C. to demand that US President Joe Biden drop the charges against Julian Assange.
Assange, 51, is currently imprisoned in Belmarsh maximum security prison in UK.
Assange is facing extradition to the US as well as a 175-year prison sentence under the ‘1917 Espionage Act’ – the prohibition of obtaining, recording, or spreading information relating to the US military and government with the intent or ‘reason to believe’ that such information may be used against the US.
These charges come from Assange’s creation of WikiLeaks, which exposed war crimes committed by the US government and military in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the infamous Collateral Murder footage of US Apache helicopters slaughtering around 18 unarmed civilians and journalists in Baghdad.
The tribunal discussed the global attacks on journalism and free speech carried out by governments, with a focus on the extradition of Assange.
Co-chair of the Belmarsh tribunal and Democracy Now host Amy Goodman said it’s “not just critical to talk about freedom of the press, but it is critical to talk about the right of the public to have access to information that is why freedom of the press is so important.”
Goodman went on to say, “A landmark case in this campaign is that of Julian Assange, the publisher who founded WikiLeaks, exposed crimes of the United States government and now faces 175 years in prison if extradited by Britain from the Belmarsh Prison, where he is currently being held.”
Goodman also noted that the Biden administration has been no better in the treatment of Assange than the Trump administration.
Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Speech, Privacy and Technology Project said that we rely on journalism to expose government crimes.
“No government in any kind of system will voluntarily expose its own crimes,” Wizner said.
American linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky gave the final word at the tribunal, saying that the 1917 Espionage Act has “no place in a free and democratic society.”
