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On Saturday 5 August 2023, activists gathered for their weekly protest (staged at Piccadilly Circus every Saturday from 4 pm to 6 pm) against the continued detention of Julian Assange in the high security Belmarsh Prison.

Assange faces up to 175 years in prison for revealing the crimes of the powerful, in particular US and UK war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. The current view of the US government, as expressed by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on a visit to Australia a week earlier (29 July 2023), is that Assange is suspected of serious criminal conduct for publishing classified documents and that "the actions that he is alleged to have committed risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries, and put named human sources at grave risk."

However, Australian MP Andrew Wilkie, who is co-chair of the Bring Assange Home parliamentary group, declared that claim was "patent nonsense," explaining to the Guardian that Mr. Blinken would be well aware of the inquiries in both the U.S. and Australia which found that the relevant Wikileaks disclosures did not result in harm to anyone."

<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/aug/01/supporters-in-australian-parliament-urge-us-to-get-julian-assange-out-of-maximum-security-prison" rel="noreferrer nofollow">www.theguardian.com/media/2023/aug/01/supporters-in-austr...</a>

52 year old Assange has spent the last four years in Belmarsh prison contesting extradition to the United States on charges for supposed "espionage." All he had done, however, like any responsible journalist should, was publish information revealing the crimes of the United States and other governments, that had been passed on to Wikileaks, a non-profit media organisation funded by donations which he had founded in 2006.

For much of Assange's time in prison, he has been kept in solitary and denied the right to books - something which even mass murderers are normally allowed - and also refused visits and discussions about his case with his lawyers. When Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, visited Assange at Belmarsh in 2019, he concluded that Assange's treatment amounted to "psychological torture," which as the testimony of many former victims illegally held at US detention sites at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram proves, is far more effective at reducing human beings to pliant vegetables than crude physical torture.

The US and British elite want to make an example of Assange to send a chilling message to all those journalists who might even consider exposing government criminality to think twice about the consequences, especially when it comes to reporting Western foreign policy, war crimes, arms exports, mass surveillance and the backing of authoritarian regimes. However one hopeful sign is that Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese, who heads the country's centre-left Labor Party, continues to assert his opposition to Washington's determination to make an example of Assange.

The idea that Julian Assange could be extradited to a supposedly fair trial in the United States which at one point seriously considered assassinating him and has also broken international law by spying on Assange's conversations (when he was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy) with his lawyers is of itself deeply shocking.

Meanwhile, the UK government continues to do everything possible to isolate Assange. In April, the Secretary-General and Director of Operations of Reporters Without Borders were both barred at the last minute, despite prior official clearance, from visiting Assange in prison.

<a href="https://rsf.org/en/uk-rsf-barred-vetted-prison-visit-julian-assange" rel="noreferrer nofollow">rsf.org/en/uk-rsf-barred-vetted-prison-visit-julian-assange</a>

It would seem easier for human rights organisations to visit dissidents in some authoritarian regimes than to visit Assange.

Worse still, it seems that Jonathan Swift, the High Court Judge who recently rejected Assange's attempt to halt his extradition on 6 June, is according to journalist and historian Mark Curtis, writing in Declassified, the government's "favourite barrister," and "previously defended the Defence and Home Secretaries" and "represented the Foreign Office in at least two legal cases in 2011 and 2015."

<a href="https://declassifieduk.org/judge-who-ruled-against-assange-built-career-as-barrister-defending-u-k-government/" rel="noreferrer nofollow">declassifieduk.org/judge-who-ruled-against-assange-built-...</a>

Curtis also points out that "It was reported in 2013 that Swift had been paid nearly a million pounds – £975,075 – over the previous three years for representing the government" and that he "now presides over Assange’s extradition case being fought by the Home Office for whom he previously worked."