When this petition was launched in mid-November 2019, the torturous prison conditions being inflicted on Julian Assange was crippling his ability to access lawyers and legal documents which denied him his right to participate in his own defense. That is why the central demand was to move Julian  “to a minimum security facility commensurate with his status of non-violent political prisoner on remand”, to remedy this situation. 

However, the situation has changed. The rapid escalation of the covid-19 crisis in the UK means that Julian’s continued incarceration in Belmarsh poses an immediate threat to his life. Julian Assange’s legal team applied for bail on the grounds that Julian’s chronic health problems made him very vulnerable to the Covid-19 virus. This application was vindictively dismissed by Judge Vanessa Baraitser on March 25th. In this video Wikileaks Editor Kristin Hraffnson discusses how the conditions become more dire for prisoners in UK prisons by the day

As of Tuesday 1st April, sixty-five prisoners had tested positive for Covid-19 across 23 prisons, a tenth of the staff numbers in the prison workforce were in self-isolation, three prisoners had died and all prisons in England and Wales were in lockdown with no visits allowed.