To the government of the UK

Julian Assange, through Wikileaks, has done the world a great service in documenting American war crimes, its spying on allies and other dirty secrets of the world’s most powerful regimes, organisations and corporations. This has not endeared him to the American deep state.

Assange’s persecution, the persecution of a publisher for publishing information [1] that was truthful and clearly in the interest of the public – and which has been republished in major newspapers around the world – is a danger to freedom of the press everywhere, especially as the USA is asserting a right to arrest and try a non-American who neither is nor was then on American soil.

He had been granted asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. But following a change of government in Ecuador, he was handed over to the British authorities last April for extradition to the USA. The sentence is already clear: if not the death penalty then life in a supermax prison and ill treatment like Chelsea Manning. The very extradition of Julian Assange to the United States would at the same time mean the final death of freedom of the press in the West. 

Therefore, our demand to the government of the UK is: don’t extradite Assange to the US! Guarantee his human rights. Furthermore, we, as EU voters, encourage European nations to take proactive steps to protect a journalist in danger. The world is still watching.