S7 - Dal libro “Distruggere Assange” della giornalista e scrittrice Sara Chessa

The first letter that Assange wrote from the prison of Belmarsh to an activist? It was very touching for all the activists of the Julian Assange Defense Committee to read the first letter that the publisher of Wikileaks wrote to an activist a month after his arrest at the Belmarsh prison. Gordon Dimac went to receive it and the website Ways of Assange published it. In a few lines, Julian said everything that was necessary to launch an SOS. An SOS to the global civil society. An SOS that spoke of a few powerful figures who hate the truth and work tearfully because this is always far from the public, always far from the human being. Thank you Gordon, you are a good person. I have been deprived of every opportunity to prepare my defense. No laptop, no internet, no computer, no library so far. Even if I managed to access them, it would be only for half an hour, with everyone else, once a week. Only two visits a month. And it takes weeks to put someone in the list of calls and to obtain the necessary data for the security control. All calls, except those of the lawyers, are recorded. And the calls last a maximum of 10 minutes and are limited to 30 minutes and are completed on the day when all the detainees are content with the phone. And the credit? Only a few pounds a week. And no one can call, that is, no one can call me. I have to prepare my defense. I have to prepare my defense in an unparalleled challenge. The other side, the other side. A superpower that has been prepared for nine years, with hundreds of people and millions spent for the case. I am defenseless, totally defenseless. And I count on you and other people of goodwill to save my life. I am intact, even if literally surrounded by murderers. The days when I could read, speak, organize myself to defend myself, my ideals and my people are over until I am free. Every other person must take my place. The US government, or rather those deplorable elements within it that hate truth, freedom and justice, want to deceive to obtain my extradition, my death, rather than allowing the public to know the truth for which I have won the most ambitious journalistic awards and have been nominated seven times for the Nobel Peace Prize. Believe me, the undefined truth is all we have. Julian Assange Now, at what point are we in the Assange case? At what point? What do we have to do? What is boiling in the pot? In the Assange case, we have always had two parallel battles. One is the legal one, the judicial one, and the other is the diplomatic one. In the judicial battle, I have seen Assange's lawyers trying all possible ways to block the extradition. First of all, they succeeded, but only because the judge recognized that, for health reasons, Assange could not be transferred to the US prisons because the US prison system, with its harsh characteristics, as has been described by one or more witnesses during the first degree trial, would have led Assange to attempt suicide or an extreme deterioration of his mental health. After this no to the extradition, which happened only for health reasons and not for all the other reasons why the extradition should have been blocked, primarily because it would put the freedom of the press on the whole planet at risk, there was a second degree trial. In the second degree trial, what did the Biden administration do? Don't forget that the extradition request was sent by the Trump administration. In the meantime, there was a change of government in the United States, but the Biden administration was ready to continue Trump's work. Under this profile, I have not yet seen differences between Republicans and Democrats. The Biden administration very cleverly sent diplomatic notes to the British government in which it promised that Assange would not be assigned to the terrible prison system of special administrative measures. But those promises, for the fact that they were made after the closure of the first degree trial, were not analyzed by Assange's defense. That is, the defense had to have the right to dismantle them if they were not serious. And from Amnesty International onwards, all the organizations that are interested in human rights and all the world's leading human rights experts say that those promises are ridiculous. I quote Agnès Calamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International. What does she say? She says that those promises are formulated in such a way as to allow the United States to go back to what they promise at all times. In essence, they say, we promise that Assange will not be assigned to the system of special administrative measures where he would spend his entire life in prison, in isolation, unless Assange does not take actions in the future that make us think that the system of special administrative measures is necessary. Now, on the one hand, they affirm something, on the other hand, they prepare the road to go back. The fact is that despite the fact that the leading human rights experts did not believe those statements for a single second, the second-degree judges instead relied on them and overturned the first-degree sentence by saying yes to the extradition. What happened next? It happened that the lawyers continued to try to save Assange. How? They filed a request for appeal against the first-degree sentence. That is, they said, it is not right that in that case the extradition was denied only on the basis of health reasons. Why? Because if Assange is extradited, an international legal precedent will be created by virtue of which any journalist who embarrasses a great power will be able to receive an extradition request, be extradited and prosecuted for what? For having revealed real facts about a great power. Unfortunately, the appeal request of Assange's lawyers was not accepted, so they could not appeal. Now, where are we? They asked for a judicial review, let's call it that, of the decision that denied them this last possibility of appeal. And the answer could arrive in a few days. If the answer is still negative, that is, if Assange is ultimately denied the appeal against that first-degree sentence and against the political decision of Minister Patel to say yes to extradition, at that point an airplane that will take Julian Assange to the United States will be prosecuted in Virginia and his most likely future will be to end up in the most terrible prison in America, ADX in Colorado. I will briefly explain to you what ADX is, according to the witnesses of the first-degree trial. The lawyer of one of the people who is in that prison, the lawyer of a person accused of terrorism who, before being extradited, had received guarantees on the basis of which he would have taken into account his health condition. Instead, his assistant is there, in that prison, without forearms, without the necessary prostheses to take care of his own person, without medical assistance for diabetes, without medical assistance for hypertension, and without medical assistance for depression. Now, I think it is enough to realize what the ADX prison in Colorado is, which is where Julian Assange, a journalist, risks arriving and spending the rest of his life in a place where his human rights can be easily violated. That is why it is important that the British judicial system finally grants an appeal against that sentence that denied extradition only for health reasons. But, in reality, there are not so many hopes that this will happen. Our hopes, instead, are on the diplomatic battle, that is, on the battle conducted, for example, by the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, because he explicitly asked Biden to file the charges against Assange. He said, enough is enough, we want Assange to return. And the diplomatic battle means putting pressure on Biden, it means that Western governments must act as allies, that is, they must have the courage not to be puppets, an ally of the United States. It is not a puppet that accepts everything, an ally is the equivalent of a friend in real life. A friend tells you if you are doing something wrong, and the same should be done by the Menoni government, the German government, the British government. They should have the courage to say to the Americans, dear, you are going against your constitution when you persecute Assange. Only that this, Western governments will do it only if we, as a civil society, will be pushed to do it. There is no possibility, and you know it well for the way in which Gianni objectively described the current state of our democracies, there is no possibility that they do it alone. We need to protest peacefully, but that we do it in many ways, that we invent ways to protest, that we take inspiration from the London activists, from their great creativity, from the way they fought from the beginning for the liberation of Assange. So here we are at this moment. In summary, if the judicial system, once again, and this is the last chance it has, will prevent Assange from appealing and therefore will favor the extradition, the lawyers will still be able to ask questions to the European Court of Human Rights, which is located at the Council of Europe, of which Gianni Marilotti was part, as part of the delegation of parliamentarians who periodically go to the Council of Europe to talk about human rights. However, the European Court of Human Rights cannot block the procedure, it can commit itself to decide on the case of Assange, so it can happen that in the meantime Assange is extradited. It can do the so-called moral suison. Or rule 39, right? Yes, it has no cogent authority, no cogent power, it cannot influence the states. It does it only for open violations of the rights sanctioned by the European Convention on Human Rights. Yes, there is a small hope, according to the lawyers, attached to Article 39 of the Convention on Human Rights, on the basis of which the Court could, with an injunction, establish that Assange remains in England. For now there have been resolutions, motions, which ask for the non-extradition of Assange from the Council of Europe. Yes. They express themselves contrary to the extradition of Assange from the United States. In fact, this is a rather particular presentation. But even that is not by force of law. Even if the European national parliaments should have taken this resolution into account, because, I tell you clearly, this is a particular presentation, because for the first time I find myself with one of the characters of my book. Gianni Marilotti, having been part of the delegation of Italian parliamentarians at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, was among the promoters of a resolution, of an amendment, let's say, to a comprehensive resolution, which asked openly... Yes, it was a report on the freedom of the media. And a group of Italian and non-Italian parliamentarians decided to insert a reference to Julian Assange asking for his release. That was a huge step that Gianni Marilotti, together with Andrei Junco, because you two were the promoters of this amendment, contributed to pass. It was the first case in which, after years of defamatory campaign, a European institution, not of the European Union, but of the Council of Europe... 47 states. 47 states are part of it. The oldest European institution. It comes before the European Union, the European Community, which later became the European Union. But it only deals with civil rights, with freedom. It doesn't deal with anything else. In any case, if the judicial process has reached this point and therefore we really risk that a van or a plane that takes Julian Assange away arrives tomorrow, it is more important the diplomatic protest of which I told you about our governments and the protest of civil society that we can set up on our own. It is really important to unite, to get out of the logic of small groups, to create a wide network. There is the group, for example, Free Assange Wave, connected directly to Stella Moris, wife of Julian Assange. I invite you to look for this group on Telegram and to join the initiatives that are being designed, because soon what is defined as Day X will arrive. And that Day X, in which the definitive yes for the extradition of Julian Assange will arrive, we have the duty to protest. But why? Because, as I told you at the beginning, the attack on Julian Assange means that we should not know anything about the war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. An attack against our right to knowledge. It cannot be defined in any other way.