In the face of mounting threats, the working class must defend Julian Assange
25 October 2018
The fight to defend Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who is being pursued by Washington for daring to make public classified documents exposing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and the plots hatched by US officials and embassies around the world, is now at a critical juncture. The mobilization of militant and active solidarity on the part of workers and youth all over the world is of utmost importance.
Assange is facing an escalating threat that he will be handed over to the British authorities and ultimately extradited to the United States to face trumped-up charges of treason and espionage, punishable by life imprisonment and even the death penalty.
He has spent the last six years as a de facto prisoner in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he sought asylum in 2012 to escape a conspiracy by the US, British and Swedish governments to have him arrested on fabricated charges of sexual molestation in order to pave the way for his extradition to the US. While Sweden has since dropped the groundless accusations against Assange, the British government is still seeking his arrest for violating the terms of his bail, when he entered the embassy to escape the clutches of the US government.
The Ecuadorian government is now signaling ever more openly that it is dropping its defense of Assange and seeking to drive him out of its London embassy and into the hands of the waiting British political police. This position was spelled out Tuesday by Ecuadorian Foreign Minister José Valencia in an interview with the Reuters news agency.
“Ecuador has no responsibility to take any further steps,” said Valencia. “We are not Mr. Assange’s lawyers, nor are we representatives of the…