ISSUE #51: Freedom of Press in under threat.
There is no press freedom and freedom of expression UNTIL Julian Assange is free.
Today marks the day when Julian Assange inches closer to being extradited to the US and tried there for 17 criminal charges under Espionage Act.
The UK court has ordered Julian’s extradition, which needs to be certified by the UK Home Secretary, Priti Patel, before he can be extradited to the US. There is very little hope that she will go against the court’s order.
He has been kept in the UK’s maximum-security Belmarsh prison since 2019. His crime, you ask? Exposing the US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2010, Assange leaked hundreds of thousands of documents on WikiLeaks (which was founded by him in 2006) that exposed how the US committed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004 to 2009.
The video, which showed how American forces killed Iraqi civilians and some journalists, speaks for itself:
The leaked documents include:
If extradited to the US, Assange could face up to 175 years in prison. He has already lived 50 years of his life.
“Publishing information that is in the public interest is a cornerstone of media freedom. Extraditing Julian Assange to face allegations of espionage for publishing classified information would set a dangerous precedent and leave journalists everywhere looking over their shoulders,” said Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary-General.
You can’t refute what she is saying. Julian is being treated like a terrorist. In fact, he is a journalist who exposed the war crimes of the most powerful nation on Earth. This sends a message to every journalist in the world that if they expose something that the powerful individuals don’t want the public to know, they will be treated like Assange, which completely undermines the point of journalism.
If there is no freedom of expression and freedom of the press, how can you expect the truth to ever come out? How will the public ever know what their governments are doing with their money?
There will be no justice in this world if those who expose injustice are treated like this.
Let alone his extradition, he should not have been arrested in the first place. If the US and UK call themselves “beacons of democracy, human rights, free press,” (which they certainly aren’t) they should have never kept him in the maximum-security prison for three years.
Again, this highlights Western hypocrisy. The Western media has all the time in the world to criticize how Russia treats its political dissents like Navalny, but when it comes to a journalist being imprisoned in their homeland, they go silent.
Do you feel the irony when they label Putin as “a war criminal” while simultaneously extraditing a journalist who tried to hold the US government accountable for its war crimes in other countries?
What an upside-down world we live in. Those who expose the war crimes are treated like they are the ones who committed war crimes. The likes of Bush and Blair are roaming freely on this planet and the whistleblowers are suffocating behind the bars.
Let me clarify one thing: Exposing war crimes is NOT a crime. It’s an act of courage that must be appreciated not punished.
Julian’s extradition will be a hard lesson to learn for those who think we have freedom of the press in the West.
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