YESTERDAY, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled that Julian Assange, the founder of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, has been unlawfully detained by Britain and Sweden since 2010.
The ruling by this UN panel, which investigates and rules on international cases of arbitrary detention, went on to demand that Assange be allowed to walk free and be compensated for his ‘deprivation of liberty’, saying his detention ‘should be brought to an end, that his physical integrity and freedom of movement be respected’.
Assange was arrested in Britain in 2010 on an arrest warrant issued in Sweden in connection with accusations of sexual misconduct made against him by two women. He had been held and questioned initially in Sweden but then released without charge. Only when he was in Britain was this decision reversed by a new Swedish prosecutor, resulting in him being held in this country pending extradition.
After losing appeals against extradition, Assange sought sanctuary in 2012 in the small Ecuadorian Embassy in London where he has remained ever since, with police guarding the building constantly in order to arrest him the moment he steps out the door.
Meanwhile, the original case against him in Sweden has progressively unravelled.
From the beginning of this lengthy saga of Assange being hounded, the hand of US imperialism and its spy organisations has been apparent.
His refusal to be extradited to Sweden was based on the very real fear that this was just a prelude to a one-way trip to America where a secret grand jury in Atlanta has compiled a case for putting him on trial for espionage – US vice-president Joe Biden called him a ‘cyber-terrorist’, while a senator has called for the death penalty.
The US has declared that the case against Assange is a state secret. This is the real crime that Assange is being hounded for, the release by WikiLeaks of hundreds of thousands of secret US cables that exposed the brutality, the barbarity, the hypocrisy and cynicism of US imperialism and its allies.
The hounding of Assange was clearly designed to act as a deterrent to any future leakers of imperialism’s dirty secrets, while wreaking vengeance on a man and his organisation who stood up and exposed the murderous and criminal activities of the US government and its wholesale and indiscriminate killing of civilians and contempt for international law in its imperialist wars in Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East.
This campaign of hounding those who courageously exposed the crimes of imperialism didn’t stop with Assange. The US army whistleblower Chelsea Manning is serving 35 years in prison for exposing the murderous acts carried out by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The analyst Edward Snowden is still living in exile in Russia after exposing the dirty secrets of US imperialism – one of the secrets Snowden’s dossiers revealed was that Assange is on a ‘Manhunt target list’ issued by the US government. The position of the Tory government was predictable. The foreign secretary, Phillip Hammond, dismissed the UN ruling with contempt saying it was ‘ridiculous’, that Assange was a ‘fugitive from justice’ and insisting that the UN had no legal right in this matter.
The Swedish government was equally dismissive of the ruling. UN rulings only have legality as long as they faithfully comply with the wishes of the imperialist nations. It is clear that despite this ruling the Tories and the Swedish government are determined to obediently follow the wishes of the US in keeping Assange in illegal detention while they wait on the opportunity to seize him and hand him over to America’s secret courts and a life sentence, or even the death penalty.
Assange, along with Manning and Snowden are not criminals, they are anti-imperialist heroes. The working class must demand that Assange is immediately freed and compensated. The real criminals are the leaders of the imperialist nations who are responsible for all the war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria – it is they who must be brought to trial to answer for their crimes against humanity.
