For a longer article explaining my support of Julian Assange, please visit this post.
Julian Assange is back in the news, and the British media remains overwhelmingly hostile. I have continued to publicly to support Julian despite this, because I don’t think he has been treated fairly under the law in a country that promises to apply justice without favour.
I became involved with Julian and Wikileaks by accident. I offered the court a bail address for Julian in December 2010, when it became clear that no one else was in a position to offer a workable bail solution.
I kept Julian out of remedial confinement because I felt that it was in the public interest for him to continue to participate in the important debate about transparency that he had initiated. I believed that in doing so I was supporting due process of law.
On 5 February 2016, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) declared that Sweden and the United Kingdom had arbitrarily detained the WikiLeaks founder since his arrest on 7 December 2010 due to legal actions against him by both countries. UNWGAD expressed many of the misgivings that I have had from the beginning about the way that the case has been handled.
Although the UN report challenges journalists to question the conduct of the legal authorities, the mainstream media’s reaction in the UK so far has mainly been to do the opposite. Instead of publishing serious investigations of the allegations against Julian, the Swedish procrastination over questioning him in Britain and the Swedish and British Governments hypocrisy over UNWGAD’s decision, they have printed uninformed diatribes against Julian.
The fact that some people don’t like the way he walks or talks has no bearing on the criminal allegations against him. Just as UNWGAD finds that the legal authorities have allowed the criminal case against Julian to have been polluted by the political controversy surrounding his Wikileaks activities, many journalists have allowed a contempt for Julian to promote an assumption of his guilt.
If journalism is supposed to address the balance and help level the playing field then it has not done so for Julian. His detractors menace and troll anybody who speaks up for him because they would rather nobody did so.
As long as I perceive this as an unequal fight, I think its important to stand up for Julian to the best of my ability. To be cowed, I believe, would be to give in to bullies and hypocrites.