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Julian Assange wins right to appeal extradition to US, remains in UK prison for now

Published

6 months ago

9 minute read

Julian Assange, Embassy Of Ecuador on May 19, 2017 in London, England.

From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

On Monday Julian Assange won the right to appeal his extradition to the United States, where he would face espionage charges, on the grounds that he could not be guaranteed a defense under the First Amendment.

In a hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice to decide his fate, imprisoned journalist Julian Assange has won the right to appeal his extradition to the United States.

The May 20 ruling means his transfer to the U.S. to face charges under the Espionage Act is delayed. He was granted the right to appeal, in his absence, on the grounds that he could not be guaranteed a defense under the First Amendment in the United States.

The move came despite assurances from U.S. lawyers and could see Assange face months more imprisonment whilst an appeal is prepared.

Leave to appeal welcomed

Assange’s lawyers have questioned assurances that he will not face the death penalty if extradited to the U.S. to face 18 charges claiming his publications through WikiLeaks damaged U.S. national security and endangered the lives of U.S. agents.

No agent has been harmed as a result of Assange’s disclosures.

The U.K.’s National Union of Journalists welcomed the move.

READ: Julian Assange’s show trial could determine the future of press freedom in the West

At this crucial juncture, this judgment serves as a positive step forward for Assange and for every journalist seeking to reveal truths through their reporting… We welcome today’s judgment and hope it is the first step in victory for Assange.

Michelle Stanistreet, NUJ general secretary, appealed for Assange’s immediate release:

President Biden should do the right thing now and clear the way for Assange’s release.

Five years and counting

“The U.K. and U.S. are happy to talk about political prisoners abroad,” said Stella Assange, in a moving video account of Assange’s ordeal published on the morning of the hearing. “But they have created a political prisoner of their own.”

She points out that whilst war criminals such as former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair are free and very prosperous, Assange has been denied the right to appear at his own trials since 2021. What is more, she says, “Julian did nothing wrong. He exposed war crimes.”

She explained why he was imprisoned – as a punishment for revealing war crimes through his organization, WikiLeaks.

Julian is in prison because WikiLeaks is a publisher which specializes in the secrets that states keep the most hidden.

She went on:

Julian revealed war crimes committed by the superpower, the United States. That superpower has punished him.

She argues that the case extends the right of states to suppress press freedom beyond its own borders. This, she says, provides a precedent for critics of any regime worldwide to be targeted and silenced in the same way.

Stella Assange, a human rights lawyer, says evidence held by WikiLeaks shows that 30 former intelligence agents have said there was a plot to assassinate Assange by the CIA.

The plot was revealed in October 2021 and documented in a piece from the same month by Patrick Cockburn titled “The CIA plot to kidnap or kill Julian Assange in London is a story that is being mistakenly ignored.”

The beginning of the end?

The current head of WikiLeaks, the outlet formerly headed by Assange, branded the court’s decision as a win, according to Consortium News.

‘This was a watershed moment in this very long battle,’ said WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn at an event following the hearing. ‘Today marked the beginning of the end of the persecution. The signaling from the courts here in London was clear to the U.S. government: We don’t believe your guarantees, we don’t believe in your assurances.’

Keeping Assange ‘caged’

Yet independent journalist Glenn Greenwald saw a darker motive in the long, drawn-out process of Assange’s continuing confinement.

His post on X (formerly Twitter) referred to the initial removal of Assange from the London Embassy of Ecuador, in which he had taken refuge in 2012.

Following accusations now withdrawn, an arrest warrant had been issued for Assange in 2010. His retreat into the Ecuadorian embassy saw him confined there for seven years.

However, 24 hours after WikiLeaks published details of high-level corruption in Ecuador, he was handed over to British police on April 11, 2019. He has been in custody or prison ever since.

Greenwald added:

The real purpose of pressuring Ecuador to remove its asylum protection for Assange, and now Biden’s relentless extradition demands, is not to bring Assange to the US for trial – the [White House] does not want that – but to keep Assange caged and destroyed.

The United Nations has long condemned his treatment, saying the British government was “arbitrarily detaining” him without charge.

Responding to one X user who said the courts were simply “kicking the can” by postponing a judgement, Greenwald replied again:

Yes, but Assange quite reasonably views extradition to the US as the worst of all options, because if that happens, he will be disappeared into a dungeon, tried in E. Virginia with national security judges who convict everyone, and then will die in a US cage.

Appeals and hope for release

With this grim fate in mind, the Defend Assange Campaign released the following appeal for his immediate release on X:

Julian Assange will remain isolated, in a cell in the UK’s harshest prison for the foreseeable future, following today’s granting of an appeal by the UK high court[.]

For over 13 years detained in one form or another – it is time to bring this charade to an end…

Hopes that President Biden, seeking to reconcile his tarnished image with younger voters, would drop the charges against Assange seem to be fading.

What remains in this box is not hope, as with that of Pandora, but a man who dared expose the crimes of the rulers to the ruled.

His treatment is an example to us all, and it is one which speaks a dark truth about those who remain in power.

Former U.K. ambassador Craig Murray, a longtime supporter of Assange, spoke outside the courtroom following the news:

“We haven’t got Julian out just yet… But we are on the way… to victory in this battle,” he said.

Murray, who recalled the 12 years he has spent in supporting Assange, gave the crowd a resoundingly confident message:

And we are seeing at last an acknowledgement of the crucial importance of freedom of speech, freedom of information, and of the public’s right to know.

And those are the grounds on which we will win this case.

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Business

Biden-Harris Admin Reportedly Backs Off On Major Emissions Initiative At UN Climate Summit

Published on November 12, 2024

By

From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

By Nick Pope

The Biden-Harris administration is quietly backing away from a plan to use the ongoing U.N. climate conference to announce an international call for emissions reductions, according to Politico.

It is not clear whether it is because President-elect Donald Trump decisively won last week’s presidential election, but Biden-Harris officials reportedly intended to partner with several other countries in announcing “ambitious” carbon emissions reduction goals for 2035 before the announcement fell through, according to Politico, which cited a draft press release it obtained and several unnamed officials. Had it not fallen through, the announcement could have gone live as early as Monday, the first day of the conference — commonly referred to as COP29 — in Azerbaijan, a Caucasian petrostate with a questionable human rights record.

The aborted call to action would not have been legally binding, though it would have served as a signal to corporations to invest in emissions reduction initiatives and pave the way for other nations to get on board, according to Politico. The countries that would have been named in the announcement would have committed to slashing emissions across nearly every sector of their respective economies, and they would have taken aim at specific chemicals like carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.

The press release announcing the commitments “clearly won’t be published” at this point, one senior foreign diplomat told Politico, which granted the source anonymity to speak freely on the matter. Beyond Trump’s victory, other potential factors that may have interfered with the plan to roll out the 2035 targets include ambivalence from potential partners or bureaucratic logjam in the European Union, an American ally that typically collaborates on similar climate targets.

The U.S. circulated the idea of putting out a statement ahead of COP29 with “a lot of parties but never pushed for it to become something more,” a European official involved in climate negotiations told Politico.

Trump’s pending return to the White House is looming large at COP29, given the president-elect’s pledges to roll back green spending, regulations and initiatives and jack up fossil fuel production, according to CBS News. Moreover, Trump has also promised to withdraw again from the U.N.’s Paris Climate Accords, which he did in his first term before the Biden-Harris administration rejoined the deal.

The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

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COVID-19

Easy Day 1 victory for Trump: Take COVID shots off schedule for kids

Published on November 12, 2024

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Matt Lamb

While Americans may be divided on a variety of issues, including abortion, guns, and parts of the LGBT agenda, a topic they seem to unite around is not injecting six-month-olds with the COVID shot.

President Donald Trump has the opportunity for an easy Day 1 in office victory — remove the COVID jabs from the childhood schedule.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention added the shots to the recommended pediatric schedule despite children, especially babies, never being at any real danger of dying from COVID. The shots have been on the recommended schedule for almost two years now – but the widespread push has been a massive failure for the pharmaceutical industry.

Despite the medical establishment getting behind the push for pediatric COVID shots, and millions of taxpayer dollars spent on boosting them, a vast majority of parents are rejecting them. In fact, while Americans may be divided on a variety of issues, including abortion, guns, and parts of the LGBT agenda, a topic they seem to unite around is not injecting six-month-olds with the COVID shot.

According to the pro-vaccine Kaiser Family Foundation, only “15% of eligible children in the U.S. got a shot.”

This means that removing the shots from the recommended schedule would generate minimal pushback from parents.

While public health “experts” would likely complain, the parents have already spoken – they don’t want two or three more jabs for their six-month-old. The CDC currently recommends around 28 different jabs in the first two years of life.

Removal of the shots would be a way for Trump to show he is serious about taking on Big Pharma while also acknowledging the problems with the jabs he pushed through with Operation Warp Speed. It would also fit in with his pledge along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “Make America Healthy Again,” since the COVID jabs are linked to numerous problems, including serious heart problems and death.

“That will be one of my priorities, to make sure that Americans – of course, we’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody,” RFK Jr. told National Public Radio recently. “We are going to make sure that Americans have good information right now. The science on vaccine safety particularly has huge deficits, and we’re going to make sure those scientific studies are done and that people can make informed choices about their vaccinations and their children’s vaccinations.”

Evidence also supports removing the shots from the recommended schedule. Presumably, removal would discourage more parents from injecting their kids, as the shots would no longer have the CDC’s stamp of approval.

 

Medical experts have warned against the COVID shots for kids, as documented by LifeSiteNews.

“The Florida Department of Health is going to be the first state to officially recommend against the COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children,” Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced in 2022. “We’re kind of scraping at the bottom of the barrel, particularly with healthy kids, in terms of actually being able to quantify with any accuracy and any confidence the even potential of benefit,” Ladapo, a Harvard University-trained doctor, said in 2022.

READ: COVID vaccine-related death estimates suggest millions could have died from the shots

Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough also called on Trump last week to pull all COVID shots from the market.

“They have not had the safety track record America wanted to see,” he said recently.

“The viral infection [from COVID itself] is like the common cold now,” he said, as reported by Just the News. “So they’re not clinically indicated. They’re not medically necessary. They should be removed from the market.”

President Trump pledged to take on the Deep State. He also wants to make America healthy again and restore actual science to federal policy and not let big corporations write our regulations. He can do so by ensuring that the CDC does not needlessly push injections for a disease that does not really affect children.

Members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices are appointed by the Department of Health and Human Services, so Trump’s HHS secretary could appoint vaccine science realists to the committee.

 

He could find ways to withhold funding until the shots are removed, or he could issue executive orders formally opposing the shots. He has some shrewd entrepreneurs like Elon Musk around him. Plus, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an experienced litigator – someone can figure it out if they have the will. It is an easy Day 1 victory, and he should take the opportunity.

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