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The panel, while including information of enormous importance – reconfirming for some, new for others – you arrived at the place that many of us struggle with: having made certain that our facts are verifiable and from legitimate sources how do we penetrate the minds, the thinking of those who are holding fast to the myths and the fabrications that are promulgated by the media. Nils Melsor, an educated, erudite, worldly individual has publicly in a documentary (Not In Our Name), in interviews, and in an op-ed that no media around the globe will print – has acknowledged that even he was influenced by the media and the subsequent ‘public conversation’ in his thinking and opinion of Julian Assange. This is the power of the media and education, such as it has been for many many many years. Perhaps from the beginning. Perhaps it is an illusion that education was once worthy. Related but somewhat tangential: please read “Green Illusions, The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism” and visit the website of Planet of the Humans.
Why does Assange continue to be imprisoned? Surely, the fact that he jumped bail once would disqualify him from being granted bail again?
It’s complicated, and relentlessly political. Mr Assange applied for and was granted political asylum. A condition of his eligibility was that he was not charged with any crime, neither in the UK nor anywhere else. The UK, expecting to send him to Sweden for questioning (which isn’t done any more), did not accept Mr Assange’s right to seek asylum at that time nor his subsequent status as a political refugee (reasonably fearing persecution by the US for his publications). The UK threatened, but stopped short of storming the Ecuadorian embassy, an act which could have triggered major repercussions internationally. It was a moment when national and international law clashed fiercely, and would go on to engender conflict between the UK and European Community, in particular from the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer. The UK is signatory to the 1951 Convention on Refugees and subject to the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 10). One would have expected the UK to abide by both, and accept Assange’s right to political asylum on the grounds of his “political opinions”. It seemed like a hard call for the UK, since that case in Sweden mattered to many… well, until we learned that the UK Crown Prosecution Service had been instructing the Swedes not to advance nor drop the case… for years. We learned from Nils Melzer about 50 violations of due process in Sweden to ensnare this man for years. Held amongst the worst of the worst criminals by the UK, for the US, Assange’s asylum plea translates as bail-jumper. The 2007 ratified US-UK Extradition Treaty of 2003, which forbids extradition for political reasons, should protect Mr Assange from refoulement to the country from which Ecuador granted him refuge – the US – but the prosecution representing the US have argued for ignoring it.