Assange Day X: Jennifer Robinson (London Feb. 20 2024)

Описание: FEBRUARY 2024, LONDON: It is Feb. 20 — Day X — the start of the two-day, two-judge hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice that will determine whether (now former) US-UK political prisoner and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can definitively appeal the decision to extradite him to the US, whose State and CIA officials plotted to kidnap and murder him for exposing their crimes.


JENNIFER ROBINSON: Before the start of morning proceedings, Assange's lawyer Jennifer Robinson addresses his supporters outside the court.


AFTER HIS ILLEGAL and forcible expulsion from a near-seven-year asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London by Metropolitan Police on April 11, 2019, Julian Assange was imprisoned in HMP Belmarsh, in near solitary confinement in a 2-x-3-meter cell and without UK charge, for more than five years. For more than four of those years, Assange was held on remand at the behest of the US Government, whose war crimes WikiLeaks helped expose.


WIKILEAKS
https://wikileaks.org/

COLLATERAL MURDER
   • WikiLeaks: Collateral Murder (Iraq, 2007)  


JULIAN ASSANGE SPENT 1,901 days in Belmarsh Prison until his release on June 24, 2024. At 5 p.m. that day, he boarded a private jet at London's Stansted Airport bound for the Northern Mariana Islands, US Commonwealth territory, to plead guilty in US District Court to long-accepted journalistic practice (receiving and publishing information in the public interest from a source).

ASSANGE'S PLEA DEAL, negotiated while he was held hostage at Belmarsh, came 35 days after the May 20, 2024, decision by London's High Court of Justice allowing him to appeal to the UK Supreme Court against his US extradition, greenlit by the same court in December 2021. A July 7, 2024, Supreme Court hearing was already scheduled when US prosecutors, facing fresh and unconflicted judges at the Assange hearings, backed down from their attempt to win Assange's US extradition.

THE US GOVERNMENT had finally capitulated to yearslong international pressure for Assange's release, which in turn had finally permeated the High Court's walls: grassroots campaigns outside US and Australian embassies; support from human, civil and free speech rights groups; researched decisions by the UN and its Special Rapporteur on Torture; parliamentary votes in Europe, Australia, Latin America and the US; and a multi-continent media and political campaign by Stella Assange, Julian's wife and lawyer, and John and Gabriel Shipton, his father and brother.

ASSANGE IS BARRED from seeking US Government compensation under the plea agreement; and also from filing US Freedom of Information Act requests about his case. As Stella Assange noted to Australian media who greeted her husband at Canberra Airport on June 25, that does not stop the public themselves from filing such requests.

#PardonAssange
#DayX