Why should we care about Julian Assange?

One of the best ways to achieve justice is to expose injustice – Julian Assange

JULIAN ASSANGE, IS FOUNDER OF WIKILEAKS, the organisation that, over the past decade, launched and inspired the flood of data leaks around the world, exposing the secret misdeeds of the previously untouchable in politics and business. Assange has since been the victim of an intense smear campaign. Like most people, he is no saint. But when you fully inform yourself of his case and his work, he’s on the right side of history.

For publishing leaks exposing the misdeeds of the US military in the Middle East, the US political and defence establishments are determined to get their hands on Assange “to lock him up for 175 years”.

In 2012 he was arrested in Britain on an Interpol warrant calling for his extradition to Sweden to face sexual offence charges there. While on bail pending the extradition hearing, he learned that the warrant was probably a ruse to hand him over to the United States authorities. (The Swedish sexual offence charges have since been withdrawn.)

Assange decided to accept the offer of asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Over the past year, after he had effectively been incarcerated in the embassy for seven years, a change of government in Ecuador saw him expelled from the embassy into the hands of UK police who arrested him for jumping bail those seven years ago.

Charged in court, he was sentenced to 50 days’ imprisonment in London’s Belmarsh Prison pending a hearing set to take place in February, when a judge will determine whether he should be extradited to the US – or not.

In October former British ambassador Craig Murray published an eyewitness account of Assange’s current state describing him as exhibiting “exactly the symptoms of a torture victim.”