Marie McInerney writes:
Leading health experts have joined lawyers, journalists, whistle-blowers and other human rights defenders in urging the Australian Government to finally act to secure Wikileak founder Julian Assange’s release from prison and end his threatened extradition to the United States.
Speakers at two high-profile events in Melbourne and Sydney in recent days have laid out the moral, legal, health and political arguments for an end to the “persecution and prosecution” of Assange, and warned of wider implications of his case for democracy, the media, and whistle-blowing.
Assange is languishing in the high security Belmarsh Prison in London, facing a US prison sentence of up to 175 years on espionage charges which the Freedom of the Press Foundation has described as “the most significant and terrifying threat” to free speech in the 21st century.
Professor Virginia Barbour, newly appointed editor in chief of The Medical Journal of Australia, added to the calls for action, saying it seemed clear from media reports that Assange’s health “has been profoundly affected” by long term imprisonment, especially his prolonged time in solitary confinement and “the sheer length of time that this whole process has continued for”.
His case, she told Croakey, “highlights, yet again, the appalling consequences of imprisonment, especially, as here, before a trial has occurred”.
Barbour, a former editor at The Lancet and a founding editor of PLOS Medicine, also expressed concern about the wider issue of press freedom, saying medical journals, like other independent publications, rely on editorial independence and freedom of speech in order to hold organisations and individuals to account.
“Without a free press, we would only read what governments and other powerful groups want us to read,” she said. “Assange’s continuing incarceration sends a chilling message about the limits to journalistic freedom that governments are willing to tolerate.”
Threat to free speech
Barbour’s warning was echoed in Sydney on Saturday at Progressive International’s Belmarsh Tribunal, named after Assange’s prison, and inspired by the Bertrand Russell-Jean-Paul Sartre Tribunals of the Vietnam War.
“Since 2010, I’ve been saying like a broken record that the criminal prosecution of Julian Assange will set a dangerous precedent that will be used to criminalise the rest of the media,” said Assange’s lawyer Jennifer Robinson, who last year urged action to bring him home at the National Press Club.
An international media coalition of press freedom, civil liberties and international human rights organisations recently called on the US to drop charges against Assange, and Australia’s journalism union, the MEAA, has said his prosecution is “a dangerous assault” on journalism that will “undermine the importance of uncovering wrongdoing”.
Yet despite many calls at this week’s #FreeAssange events for greater protection of media freedom, including from MEAA Media President Karen Percy (watch her speech), the Australian mainstream media has been largely missing in action, said former Reuters Baghdad bureau chief Dean Yates.
Yates said his Iraqi colleagues Namir Noor Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh would have been “forgotten statistics of the Iraq war” if not for the release by Assange and whistle-blower Chelsea Manning of the Collateral Murder video which revealed US military lies about about their deaths in 2007.
He welcomed an “extraordinary array of varied voices” at the Sydney event calling on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to bring Assange home, including Labor, Liberal, Greens and independent MPs.
But Yates said there was “one notable exception to this growing chorus calling for Julian’s release: mainstream Australian media”.
At the Melbourne event on Tuesday, Yates put a question to Australian journalists:
“Why are you so silent on Julian Assange?
“If you think your role is to hold power to account, then you’re failing miserably. If you think your role is to protect the public’s right to know, then you’re failing miserably.
“It’s the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, for God’s sake,” he said.
PM urged to stand up
The Melbourne event took place with the backdrop of a life-sized bronze art installation ‘Anything To Say?: A Monument to Courage which portrays Manning, Assange and US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden standing on chairs, alongside an empty fourth chair inviting others to also stand up for freedom of speech and the right to know.
Assange’s supporters are urging Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to firmly step up on the fourth chair, to press for Assange’s freedom during his US visit later this month and before the next round of US presidential primaries make his case even more politically charged.
Albanese raised hopes last year, saying he had made his position clear on Assange’s case to the US Administration that “enough is enough” and “it is time that this matter be brought to a close”.
But there is growing concern that it will be too little, too late, with no known details about who he has petitioned, including whether he has spoken directly to US President Biden or US Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy or other officials.
“We don’t know the strength of his intervention, if we can call it that. And we have no idea of what hope there might be for Julian Assange in the American response,” journalist Kerry O’Brien told the Sydney event, warning that Australia’s reputation and the credibility of the US-Australian alliance was at stake.
“The longer Julian Assange remains caught in the web of US legal procedure and British procedure, without demonstrable and effective intervention by the Australian Government to bring him home, the more the Australian Government’s credibility will suffer,” he said.
“And if Australia’s representations are made forcefully, albeit privately, but then rebuffed by the US, what will it say about the true nature of Australia’s status in an alliance that has been preserved at the core of this country’s entire foreign policy for generations?”
“It is long past the time for Julian Assange to be freed, and to come home.”
O’Brien was one of 16 speakers at the Belmarsh Tribunal. Co-host and journalist Mary Kostakidis said each speaker gave “direct and unique insight into the unprecedented prosecution of a publisher under the Espionage Act, its extraterritorial reach, and the consequences for press freedom and democracy”.
Among them were former Foreign Minister Bob Carr and high-profile whistle-blowers: David McBride, a former Australian military lawyer facing jail for exposing war crimes in Afghanistan, Bernard Collaery, charged after revelations Australia had spied on East Timor, and former CIA analyst John Kiriakou, who was jailed for revealing details of US torture programs including waterboarding.
Impact of prolonged detention
Independent MP Dr Monique Ryan, a member of the cross-party and growing Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Group, addressed the Tribunal by video, speaking, as a doctor, to the psychological and physical effects of prolonged detention on any individual, “no matter how strong or robust they may be going into that process”.
“But the extent to which Julian Assange has been victimised by the various processes applied to him internationally in the last few years is extreme,” she said, adding that anyone with concern for his wellbeing is aware that “those prolonged periods of detention not only cause acute problems, but then cause chronic health issues both physical and psychological.”
Melbourne academic Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who was held in an Iranian prison for more than two years before her release was secured by Australia, said Assange has been put through psychological torture for more than a decade.
“I know all too full well what prison can do to your body, your brain, your mind and your spirit,” she said.
Moore-Gilbert said the Australian Government demonstrated in her case it was “truly willing to move mountains” when it came to her release, pulling off “remarkable diplomatic feats” in a tri-nation deal.
She called on it to “demonstrate the same resoluteness” to secure Assange his freedom and “to put an end to the long suffering and torment this poor man has suffered”.
“He’s a brave person who stood up and spoke up for what is right,” she said.
Dr Sue Wareham, a member of the Medical Association for Prevention of War and Doctors for Assange, which demanded an end to Assange’s “torture and medical neglect” in a 2020 open letter in The Lancet, has written at Croakey about Assange, urging other health professionals and groups to speak up about him.
“Few people are paying as heavy a price for defending our right to know what is done in our name,” she told Croakey this week. “How can we credibly point the finger at other nations over war crimes when an Australian citizen is treated like this for disclosing, among other things, war crimes committed by our side in Iraq and elsewhere?”
Wareham said the MAPW would be using 20 March, the anniversary of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, in part to draw attention to the cruel injustice inflicted on Assange, while “meanwhile, the countries that invaded, which include Australia, are not being held accountable in any way for their catastrophic actions”.
“The wrong people are being prosecuted,” she said.
In other chilling concerns, Jennifer Robinson said that, apart from the freedom of speech concerns in Assange’s case, the due process violations he has been subject to “should stop this case in its tracks”.
Authorities have spied on him, on his medical appointments and on his lawyers, and seized legally privileged material, she said.
Her concern that Assange, if extradited and convicted in the US, would end up in “the darkest black hole of the US prison system” was shared by former CIA analyst John Kiriakou, introduced to the Tribunal as “belonging in a hall of the pantheon of the greatest whistleblowers of this century”.
Imprisoned for his revelations, Kiriakou said Assange was likely to be housed in a ‘communication management unit’, which limited and surveilled all communications. They had been designed for dangerous terrorists involved in mass attacks, but now housed medical whistleblower Marty Gottesfeld, drone whistleblower Daniel Hale and environmental activists, he said.
Complicity
In echoes of the Robodebt scandal, speakers warned about the critical roles of senior bureaucrats in the “complicit inactivity” that has prevailed for Assange.
Directly addressing Albanese, former senior diplomat Alison Bronowski asked why it was taking so long for the Prime Minister to act on Assange and whether it was because he was still getting advice from those who advised the former Coalition Government and opposed action on Assange.
“It can’t be easy, with people with that kind of experience, to contradict them, because they have all the arguments at their fingertips to tell you why it would be a bad thing, bad for the [US/Australian] Alliance, bad for Australia, bad for international security, blah, blah, and so on….”, she said offering other international remedies Australia could consider to protect Assange.
Lawyer Bernard Collaery, prosecuted with his client, former intelligence officer Witness K, for their role in exposing Australian efforts to bug the government offices of Timor-Leste, also questioned the advice being given to the Australian Government, saying Assange was “not a prisoner facing a genuine judicial process” but actually meets “the international definition of a hostage”.
He warned that “not all of what has been done and what isn’t being done for Julian can be taking place without the complicity of senior bureaucrats” and urged investigations like the Robodebt Royal Commission into both the prosecution of Witness K and the Assange case.
In damning testimony to the Tribunal, lawyer Kellie Tranter said her efforts to document Australia’s actions on Assange through countless Freedom of Information requests showed his case has been dealt with “through the prism of international policy considerations and strategic alliances, rather than objective considerations of truth, justice and actual circumstances”.
Describing “institutionalised pre-judgement, perceived rather than actual risks, and complicity through silence” in Australian governments and bureaucracies, she delivered a powerful indictment of Australia’s “complicit inactivity”. She said:
For every reasonable request that has been disregarded, for chairs that have remained empty when they required the presence of active observers, for every international law finding ignored, for every record that remains uncorrected, for turning away when an Australian life has been threatened and for the silence that has descended in the face of injustice, I say to many former and current senior public servants and ministers, across many departments, that you may have no shame now, but history will hold you accountable.”
Statement from Attorney General
Asked about calls to the Australian Government to address restrictions on press freedom, Attorney General Mark Dreyfus’ office directed Croakey to his recent ABC interview about the round table he hosted in February with major Australian media outlets (also behind closed doors, as Kerry O’Brien noted).
In relation to Assange, his spokesperson said:
The Australian Government has been clear in our view that Mr Assange’s case has dragged on for too long and that it should be brought to a close.
We will continue to express this view to the governments of the United Kingdom and United States.
As the Prime Minister has said, not all foreign affairs is best conducted with a megaphone.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade will continue to offer consular assistance to Mr Assange, noting that Australia is not a party to Mr Assange’s case, nor can the Australian Government intervene in the legal matters of another country.”
Note: Independent MP Andrew Wilkie is hosting a virtual briefing for Senators and MPs in Canberra on Thursday from Assange’s wife Stella, and attended by his father John Shipton and Australian lawyer Stephen Kenny, who acted on behalf of former Guantanamo Bay inmate David Hicks.
• Watch the full Belmarsh Tribunal here.
• See Marie McInerney’s Twitter threads from the Belmarsh Tribunal and Anything To Say event.
• See Belmarsh Tribunal Twitter threads also from: Progressive International and @FlickRubicon.
Melbourne photos by Marie McInerney, except where otherwise noted.
Croakey acknowledges and thanks donors to our public interest journalism funding pool for supporting this article.
One of the best articles on the vexed, scandalous and unjust incarceration of Julian Assange. Mainstream media need to do better on this. Congratulations to Marie McInerney.
At last some serious attention to this scandalous and inhumane case.