SEP meeting and livestream on December 16: What next in the fight to free Julian Assange?
By
the Socialist Equality Party (Australia)
28 November 2018
As this year draws to a close, WikiLeaks publisher and Australian citizen Julian Assange remains effectively imprisoned inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, denied sunlight and medical care, and blocked from communicating with the outside world. A court document, which surfaced in November, confirms that the US government has filed and sealed criminal charges against Assange, on the basis that his media organisation, WikiLeaks, published leaked information revealing US war crimes and anti-democratic imperialist intrigues.
The information vindicates the fight waged by Assange and his defenders against an arrest warrant, issued against him in 2010, obligating him to answer “questions” over false allegations that he had committed sexual assault in Sweden. The allegations were fabricated in order to provide ammunition for various pro-US layers to discredit Assange and to create the conditions for him to be rendered to a country that could rapidly extradite him to the US. The American ruling elite is determined to make an example of Assange by putting him on trial for “espionage” or “conspiracy,” in order to intimidate every journalist and whistleblower.
For more than eight years, the persecution of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks has been at the very centre of systematic attempts by the US and allied governments to censor or silence independent and critical media. Google and Facebook are openly collaborating with this agenda, blocking access to alternative sources of information and analysis, on the basis of fraudulent allegations that they amount to “fake news.”
The American, British and Ecuadorian…