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Today is day two and the last day of the final hearing for the appeal against the extradition of Wiki Leaks founder Julian Assange. Yesterday crowds showed their support for Assange which included Craig Murray who also attended the hearing and said that although Julian Assange was given permission to attend in person or by video link, sadly he was too unwell to do either. Murray also said that the hearing was held in a disappointingly small court which was unable to seat more than just a few people.
Additionally, journalists were assigned to a Victorian gallery, no table to take notes, use laptops, NO chance to hear and see what was being discussed in court” according to Journalist Stefania Maurizi, who has also revealed “we heard the arguments of the JA defense, including 2 key ones: 1) U.S. charges could be reformulated so that DeathPenalty applies 2) U.S. made repeated references to the fact that First Amendment does NOT apply to JA In both cases, NO guarantees were provided by U.S.”
Support for Assange Yesterday.
He Should Be Given a Medal
Many of the supporters would agree with the words of Noam Chomsky when he said that Julian “shouldn’t be the subject of grand jury hearings, he should be given a medal, he is contributing to democracy.”
Yet he has received no medals just years of imprisonment and legal hearings and as Professor Yanis Varoufakis writes, “We are at the final stretch.
“Britain’s High Court judges get their last chance to decide whether to wash their hands of Julian Assange and let him be extradited to the United States – where he will disappear in a supermax prison maze never to be heard of again until he dies.
Britain’s High Court is on Trial
“Julian is not on trial. He has already been declared a hero of journalism and of everyone around the world who believe in the right of the public to know what crimes their governments have perpetrated in their name, behind their backs. Britain’s High Court is on trial.
This is the Court’s last chance to restore a small part of the British courts’ dignity that was sacrificed by judges who, year in year out, allowed themselves to be deployed as the legal agents of war criminals. But, let us make no mistake: It is not just Britain’s judges that are on trial. So are we – citizens, journalists, organisations and politicians who claim to care for universal human rights and press freedom.
History will deliver its own verdict in due course on us depending on whether we stand with Julian while the judges deliberate – and on whether we continue to stand with Julian the day after the High Court verdict. Let us commit to passing History’s test, even if the United Kingdom’s High Court judges fail it.” Yanisvarou Fakis
“If they fail it, and Britain extradites Assange to US, the U.S. government has been gifted the ability of an extraterritorial reach to go anywhere in world and pluck any journalist publishing information they don’t like. Understand the stakes. And mobilise to defend your freedom. There is no way back from this.” says chief investigative reporter of Declassified, Matt Kennard.
The Two Dangers
Historian, Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist Craig Murray outside the Royal Court of Justice in London spells out the dangers that Julian Assange could be faced with. After attending the hearing Craig Murry wrote his thoughts in the article below.
Assange Final Appeal – Your Man in the Public Gallery 2
Reporting on Julian Assange’s extradition hearings has become a vocation that has now stretched over five years. From the very first hearing, when Justice Snow called Assange “a narcissist” before Julian had said anything whatsoever other than to confirm his name, to the last, when Judge Swift had simply in 2.5 pages of glib double spaced A$ dismissed a tightly worded 152 page appeal from some of the best lawyers on earth, it has been a travesty and charade marked by undisguised institutional hostility.
We were now on last orders in the last chance saloon, as we waited outside the Royal Courts of Justice for the appeal for a right of final appeal.
The architecture of the Royal Courts of Justice was the great last gasp of the Gothic revival; having exhausted the exuberance that gave us the beauty of St Pancras Station and the Palace of Westminster, the movement played out its dreary last efforts at whimsy in shades of gray and brown, valuing scale over proportion and mistaking massive for medieval. As intended, the buildings are a manifestation of the power of the state; as not intended, they are also an indication of the stupidity of large scale power.
Court number 5 had been allocated for this hearing. It is one of the smallest courts in the building. Its largest dimension is its height. It is very high, and lit by heavy mock medieval chandeliers hung by long cast iron chains from a ceiling so high you can’t really see it. You expect Robin Hood to suddenly leap from the gallery and swing across on the chandelier above you. The room is very gloomy; the murky dusk hovers menacingly above the lights like a miasma of despair, below them you peer through the weak light to make out the participants.
A huge tiered walnut dais occupies half the room, with the judges seated at its apex, their clerks at the next level down, and lower lateral wings reaching out, at one side housing journalists and at the other a huge dock for the prisoner or prisoners, with a massy iron cage that looks left over from a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
This is in fact the most modern part of the construction; caging defendants in medieval style is in fact a Blair era introduction to the so-called process of law.
Rather incongruously, the clerks’ tier was replete with computer hardware, with one of the two clerks operating behind three different computer monitors and various bulky desktop computers, with heavy cables twisting in all directions like sea kraits making love. The computer system seems to bring the court into the 1980’s, and the clerk behind it looked uncannily like a member of a synthesiser group of that era, right down to the upwards pointing haircut.
In period keeping, this computer feed to an overflow room did not really work, which led to a number of halts in proceedings.
All the walls are lined with high bookcases housing thousands of leather bound volumes of old cases. The stone floor peeks out for one yard between the judicial dais and the storied wooden pews, with six tiers of increasingly narrow seating. The barristers occupied the first tier and their instructing solicitors the second, with their respective clients on the third. Up to ten people per line could squeeze in, with no barriers on the bench between opposing parties, so the Assange family was squashed up against the CIA, State Department and UK Home Office representatives.
That left three tiers for media and public, about thirty people. There was however a wooden gallery above which housed perhaps twenty more. With little fuss and with genuine helpfulness and politeness, the court staff – who from the Clerk of Court down were magnificent – had sorted out the hundreds of those trying to get in, and we had the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, we had 16 Members of the European Parliament, we had MPs from several states, we had NGOs including Reporter Without Borders, we had the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, and we had, (checks notes) me, all inside the Court.
I should say this was achieved despite the extreme of official unhelpfulness from the Ministry of Justice, who had refused official admission and recognition to all of the above, including the United Nations. It was pulled together by the police, court staff and the magnificent Assange volunteers led by Jamie. I should also acknowledge Jim, who with others spared me the queue all night in the street I had undertaken at the International Court of Justice, by volunteering to do it for me.
This sketch captures the tiny non-judicial portion of the court brilliantly. Paranoid and irrational regulations prevent publications of photos or screenshots.
The acoustics of the court are simply terrible. We are all behind the barristers as they stood addressing the judges, and their voices were at the same time muffled yet echoing from the bare stone walls.
I did not enter with a great deal of hope. As I have explained in How the Establishment Functions, judges do not have to be told what decision is expected by the Establishment. They inhabit the same social milieu as ministers, belong to the same institutions, attend the same schools, go to the same functions. The United States’ appeal against the original blocking of Assange’s extradition was granted by a Lord Chief Justice who is the former room-mate, and still best friend, of the minister who organised the removal of Julian from the Ecuadorean Embassy.
The blocking of Assange’s appeal was done by Judge Swift, a judge who used to represent the security services, and said they were his favourite clients. In the subsequent Graham Phillips case, where Mr Phillips was suing the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) for sanctions being imposed upon him without any legal case made against him, Swift actually met FCDO officials – one of the parties to the case – and discussed matters relating to it privately with them before giving judgment. He did not tell the defence he had done this. They found out, and Swift was forced to recuse himself.
Personally I am surprised Swift is not in jail, let alone still a High Court judge. But then what do I know of justice?
The Establishment politico-legal nexus was on even more flagrant display today. Presiding was Dame Victoria Sharp, whose brother Richard had arranged an £800,000 loan for then Prime Minister Boris Johnson and immediately been appointed Chairman of the BBC, (the UK’s state propaganda organ). Assisting her was Justice Jeremy Johnson, another former barrister representing MI6.
By an amazing coincidence, Justice Johnson had been brought in seamlessly to replace his fellow ex MI6 hire Justice Swift and find for the FCDO in the Graham Phillips case!
And here these two were now to judge Julian!
What a lovely, cosy club is the Establishment! How ordered and predictable! We must bow down in awe at its majesty and near divine operation. Or go to jail.
Well, Julian is in jail, and we stood ready for his final shot for an appeal. We all stood up and Dame Victoria took her place. In the murky permanent twilight of the courtroom, her face was illuminated from below by a comparatively bright light of a computer monitor. It gave her a grey, spectral appearance, and the texture and colour of her hair merged into the judicial wig seamlessly. She seems to hover over us as a disturbingly ethereal presence.
Her colleague, Justice Johnson, for some reason was positioned as far to her right as physically possible. When they wished to confer he had to get up and walk. The lighting arrangements did not appear to cater for his presence at all, and at times he merged into the wall behind him.
Dame Victoria opened by stating that the court had given Julian permission to attend in person or to follow on video, but he was too unwell to do either. After that disturbing news, Edward Fitzgerald KC rose to open the case for the defence to be allowed an appeal.
There is a crumpled magnificence about Mr Fitzgerald. He speaks with great authority and a moral certainty that compels belief. At the same time he appears so large and well-meaning, so absent of vanity or pretence, that it is like watching Paddington Bear in a legal gown. He is a walking caricature of Edward Fitzgerald. Barrister’s wigs have tight rolls of horsehair stuck to a mesh that stretches over the head. In Mr Fitzgerald’s case, the mesh has to be stretched so far to cover his enormous brain, that the rolls are pulled apart, and dot his head like hair curlers on a landlady.
Fitzgerald opened with a brief headline summary of what the defence would argue, in identifying legal errors by Judge Swift and Magistrate Barrister, that meant an appeal was viable and should be heard.
Firstly, extradition for a political offence was explicitly excluded under the UK/US Extradition Treaty which was the basis for the proposed extradition. The charge of espionage was a pure political offence, recognised as such by all legal authorities, and Wikileaks’ publications had been to a political end, and even resulted in political change, so were protected speech.
Barrister and Swift were wrong to argue that the Extradition Treaty was not incorporated in UK domestic law and therefore “not justiciable”, because extradition against its terms engaged Article V of the European Convention on Human Rights on Abuse of Process and Article X on Freedom of Speech.
The Wikileaks revelations had revealed serious state illegally by the government of the United States, up to and including war crimes. It was therefore protected speech.
Article III and Article VII of the ECHR were also engaged because in 2010 Assange could not possibly have predicted a prosecution under the Espionage Act, as this had never been done before despite a long history in the USA of reporters publishing classified information in national security journalism. The “offence” was therefore unforeseeable. Assange was being “Prosecuted for engaging in the normal journalistic practice of obtaining and publishing classified information”.
The possible punishment in the United States was entirely disproportionate, with a total possible jail sentence of 175 years for those “offences” charged so far.
Assange faced discrimination on grounds of nationality, which would make extradition unlawful. US authorities had declared he would not be entitled to First Amendment protection in the United States because he is not a US citizen.
There was no guarantee further charges would not be brought more serious than those which had already been laid, in particular with regard to the Vault 7 publication of CIA secret technological spying techniques. In this regard, the United States had not provided assurances the death penalty could not be invoked.
The CIA had made plans to kidnap, drug and even to kill Mr Assange. This had been made plain by the testimony of Protected Witness 2 and confirmed by the extensive Yahoo News publication. Therefore Assange would be delivered to authorities who could not be trusted not to take extra-judicial action against him.
Finally, the Homes Secretary had failed to take into account all these due factors in approving the extradition.
Fitzgerald then moved into the unfolding of each of these arguments, opening with the fact that the US/UK Extradition Treaty specifically excludes extradition for political offences, at Article IV.
Fitzgerald said that Espionage was the “quintessential” political offence, acknowledged as such in every text book and precedent. The court did have jurisdiction over this point because ignoring the provisions of the treaty rendered the court liable to accusations of abuse of process. He noticed that neither Swift not Barrister , had made any judgment on whether or not the offences charged were political, relying on the argument the treaty did not apply anyway.
But the entire extradition depended on the treaty. It was made under the treaty. “You cannot rely on the treaty, and then refute it”.
This point brought the first overt reaction from the judges, as they looked at each other to wordlessly communicate what they had made of it. It was a point of which they had felt the force.
Fitzgerald continued that when the 2003 Extradition Act, on which the Treaty depended, had been presented to Parliament, ministers had assured parliament that people would not be extradited for political offences. Barrister and Swift had said that the 2003 Act had deliberately not had a clause forbidding extradition for political offences. Fitzgerald said you could not draw that inference from an absence. There was nothing in the text permitting extradition for political offences. It was silent on the point.
Nothing in the Act precluded the court from determining that an extradition contrary to the terms of the treaty under which the extradition was taking place, would be a breach of process. In the United States, there had been cases where extradition to the UK under the treaty had been prevented by the courts because of the no political extradition clause. That must apply at both ends.
Of the UK’s 158 extradition treatises, 156 contained a ban on extradition for political offences. This was plainly systematic and entrenched policy. It could not be meaningless in all these treaties. Furthermore this was the opposite of a novel argument. There were a great many authoritative cases, stretching back centuries, in the UK, US, Ireland, Canada, Austraila and many other countries in which no political extradition was firmly established jurisprudence. It could not suddenly be “not justiciable”.
It was not only justiciable, it had been very extensively adjudicated.
All of the offences shared were as “espionage” except for one. That “hacking” charge, of helping Chelsea Manning in receiving classified documents, even if it were true, was plainly a similar allegation of a form of espionage activity.
The indictment describes Wikileaks as a “non state hostile intelligence agency”. That was plainly an accusation of espionage. This is self-evidently a politically motivated prosecution for a political offence.
[To be continued. Have to rush back into court. Sorry no proof reading yet]
Source Craig Murry – https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/about-craig-murray/
The hearing is continuing today…
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Categories: Breaking News
I used to think that there were some white hats out there, somewhere, even if nobody knew who they were, there had to be someone, somewhere, within that system, some white hat personalities.
Even though I am already cynical, I realize I was wrong, there are none.
zero. none.
Hi
william weaver,
Do not be too cynical, there are White Hats out there.
They seem to be using Gitmo as the centre.
There are a lot of Black Hats, it may take a while.
The Christians are under attack at the moment.
Dave, have you contacted Ed Miliband about Assange-perhaps you might consider writing to him very soon?
https://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=236651
The White Hats have a lot to do.
At the beginning I thought the same. But not anymore.
Because they, the cult, the enemy are everywhere, infiltrated everything, if there was some good conspiracy within the police, army, whatever they probably were uncovered long time ago and we didn’t even heard about it. Or vaxxed by now. Vaxxed – even if they are still healthy – can’t be trusted anymore, they are like being under a spell (based on experience they are “blind” and “deaf” for reality).
That Global Leaders of the Future was a very good idea. Freemasons also infiltrated everything, there was someone on the DM writing that police consist of freemasons mainly.
Anyone remember the group who – at the beginning – demolished 4-5G in the UK? They disappeared and we didn’t heard about burning masts anymore.
[…] Assange Final Appeal – Your Man in the Public Gallery 2 – Craig Murray. […]
God willing Julian will come out the other side of this nightmare, free.
Thoughts and hopes are always with him, and even though the judges are as bent as the worse of humanity, surely even they may have a small sense of concience or at least have to abide by the law that they govern.
Too many truth tellers are being lost now, but the tide will turn and the network will be dismantled, slowly but surely.
United States was sold-out in 1913 when The City of London seduced Woodrow Wilson into creating ‘The Fed’ which he later regreted. In the same year; the Congress was seduced into legalizing Income Tax which was never really legal at it required an Amendment to the Constitution which never had sufficient signatures to pass; thus IT’S STILL ILLEGAL TO THIS DAY.
After WWII, the U.S. enterred into partnership with the U.K. for God only knows what reasons… As the Corporations united among the U.K., U.S. and Nazi Germany were UNITED and all funded both sides of the war with Switzerland being the CONTRABAND HIGHWAY FOR ALL KINDS OF TRADE BETWEEN THE SIDES FOR THE BANKERS TO ENRICH THEMSELVES WITH.
Following WWII; Mi5/6 were instrumental with building the CIA with the Dulles Bros. and to this day it’s recognized as just another Branch of GCHQ, MI5 and Mi6 exactly as Mossad and the all the other Intelligence Depts. of what’s now called ‘The Five Eyes’.
We need to pray for Julian Assange because THE ENEMY ALREADY HAS HIM AS THE U.K. IS THE PRIMARY ENEMY ORDERING THE U.S. AROUND AS WELL AS AUSTRALIA. HE’S ALREADY IN ENEMY HANDS. The OBastards, CIA, FBI and all in what was once The United States are merely puppets and the ENEMY/CRIMINALS AGAINST ALL HUMANITY.
My brother recommended I might like this web site He was totally right This post actually made my day You cannt imagine just how much time I had spent for this information Thanks
Is there any real justice in this world!!!!!
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