The Sputnik cameraman by end of transmission, and possibly not seen on these two (shared?) stream of RT and Sputnik had the great sense of focusing on the statue of JUSTICE, at the top of the building. 

This is a cropped view of the image...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU26JEGs76Q&ab_channel=RT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5OTolOTPRw

Sputnik is live outside #London's Central Criminal Court as UK District Judge Vanessa Baraitser is expected to deliver her verdict on whether WikiLeaks founder #JulianAssange can be extradited to the United States. Assange's #extradition trial ended at London's Old Bailey court on 1 October after his defence team spent four weeks trying to prove that the whistleblower was being indicted for political reasons.

Note: Sputnik and RT are in part or in whole funded by the Russian government. Without them we would not have seen Assange being taken away from the Ecuadorian embassy by the English police...

• Matthew Clair

How the attorney-client relationship favors the privileged in criminal court—and denies justice to the poor and to working-class people of color

The number of Americans arrested, brought to court, and incarcerated has skyrocketed in recent decades. Criminal defendants come from all races and economic walks of life, but they experience punishment in vastly different ways. Privilege and Punishment examines how racial and class inequalities are embedded in the attorney-client relationship, providing a devastating portrait of inequality and injustice within and beyond the criminal courts.

Matthew Clair conducted extensive fieldwork in the Boston court system, attending criminal hearings and interviewing defendants, lawyers, judges, police officers, and probation officers. In this eye-opening book, he uncovers how privilege and inequality play out in criminal court interactions. When disadvantaged defendants try to learn their legal rights and advocate for themselves, lawyers and judges often silence, coerce, and punish them. Privileged defendants, who are more likely to trust their defense attorneys, delegate authority to their lawyers, defer to judges, and are rewarded for their compliance. Clair shows how attempts to exercise legal rights often backfire on the poor and on working-class people of color, and how effective legal representation alone is no guarantee of justice.

Superbly written and powerfully argued, Privilege and Punishment draws needed attention to the injustices that are perpetuated by the attorney-client relationship in today’s criminal courts, and describes the reforms needed to correct them.

Read more:

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691194332/privilege-and-punishment

Julian Assange would have been erased by such a "justice" system...

Speaking to reporters outside the court building, Hrafnsson called District Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s ruling a “great disappointment.”

It’s unjust, unfair, and illogical, when you consider her ruling two days ago about Julian’s health.

On Monday, Baraitser refused to allow Assange’s extradition to the US, citing concerns that the American justice system cannot prevent his possible suicide behind bars. Yet on Wednesday, she refused to grant bail, saying there is a high risk of the defendant not showing up for the appeal proceedings.

Baraitser previously denied Assange’s bail requests in September 2019 and March 2020 for the same reason.

At the same time, the activist’s lawyer has argued that the judge’s recent decision to deny extradition “massively reduces” any motivation not to appear in court.

Hrafnsson told reporters that Assange’s physical and mental health has significantly deteriorated in the high-security Belmarsh prison in London, where he has already served a 50-week sentence for skipping bail in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden.

“To send him back there doesn’t make any sense,” Hrafnsson said, adding that the ruling will likely be appealed in the nearest future. “The fight will continue. We want this to end, but we have confidence that justice will prevail.”

Stella Morris, Assange’s partner and the mother of his two children, stressed that the activist should not have been locked up in Belmarsh in the first place. “I urge the [US] Department of Justice to drop the charges and the President of the United States to pardon Julian,” she said.

In the US, Assange is accused of conspiracy to obtain and release top secret information pertaining to the conduct of American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. He could face up to 175 years in prison if extradited and found guilty of all charges. 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/511693-assange-bail-request-rejected-hrafnsson/

Keeping assange in prison CONTRIBUTES TO THE DETERIORATION OF HIS MENTAL STATE. Is this Judge genuine about her verdict?

FREE ASSANGE TODAY!

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publish and be damned...

The case of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is complex, containing elements of law, freedom of speech and of the media, journalism, politics, international relations and health. In the recent hearing to determine whether Assange should be extradited to the US, health became the dominant discourse. He may die if several Western governments do not stop persecuting him. 

Assange is seriously mentally ill. The magistrate in the extradition proceeding decided he could not be extradited to the US because if he were, it was highly likely he would die by suicide. Other aspects of the legal reasoning in that judgment were open to criticism, but this one wasn’t.

Assange is a political prisoner, having been locked up for 10 years at the behest of the governments of the US, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Ecuador and, because of its neglect of his cause, Australia.

Assange was the director of Wikileaks at the time it released a hoard of US government documents revealing details of American political and military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some quarter of a million documents were involved. Extracts were published in association with the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde and El Pais. The US went after Assange, not the newspaper editors.

Wikileaks was not in league with any nation that was America’s enemy. It sought to expose to the world the nefarious and sometimes deadly activity in which the US and, later, other governments had engaged. It acted like any journalist with a brief to investigate matters of national security might have done. It disclosed classified documents in the public interest so that news organisations could report on their content and the public could make evidence-based assessments as to the propriety of the actions that had been revealed.

Nevertheless, the US government argued that the documents’ disclosure might have caused serious damage. The contention was that in releasing the trove of documents, Wikileaks had endangered the work and the lives of local people who had acted as informers on behalf of the US government and its allies.

It has not been widely reported, however, that the US government commissioned an internal investigation to study the effect of the disclosures and to produce a list of people who might have been killed because of the revelations. After an exhaustive examination, the team of 120 counter-intelligence operatives, under the direction of Brigadier Robert Carr, determined that it had not been able to find a single person who had died as a result of the Wikileaks releases.

Despite this finding, even as late as the recent UK extradition hearing, the US government has continued to assert that a number of of its military collaborators and citizen informers had been killed or injured as a result of Wikileaks’ disclosures.

Assange had been working for some time in the UK. However, his freedom ended not long after the document dump in 2010. The cause was allegations of rape brought against him by prosecutors in Stockholm. The Swedish Government sought his extradition from the UK to answer questions in relation to alleged offences that had occurred during two separate episodes of sexual intercourse with women while in the Swedish capital.

Apart from those involved no one knows exactly what happened on those two evenings. The stories of the participants are starkly opposed. Assange claimed his innocence from the outset. The two complainants’ accounts could not be dismissed. That said, Swedish prosecutors eventually discontinued all relevant criminal proceedings. Assange was neither tried nor convicted of rape or any other sexual misdemeanour.

The significance of these events lies not in the facts about the sexual interactions, however, but in the extradition proceedings that emerged from them. As soon as the Swedish Government initiated extradition proceedings, the UK Government took Assange into detention. There followed an extraordinary series of events.

Assange was desperately afraid that if he were extradited to face charges in Sweden, no matter what the outcome, the Swedish Government would send him on to the US to face prosecution in relation to Wikileaks’ activities in publishing classified information. The focus of US attention remained upon the Iraq/Afghanistan revelations. The US Government denied it intended to charge Assange but, drip by drip, news leaked out that a Grand Jury had been convened to determine what criminal charges he would face if returned to the custody of US authorities.

To avoid extradition to the US, Assange skipped bail in the UK and took up asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. This foreshadowed a personal disaster. The UK Government established a permanent police presence outside the Embassy and made it clear Assange would be arrested as soon as he tried to leave it.

Inside the Embassy, he had two rooms, one tiny living room and an equally tiny bathroom. His stay at the Embassy lasted seven years. He could not go outside. He was deprived of fresh air, sunlight, the ability to move and exercise freely and access to medical care. The UK Government refused to allow his transfer to a teaching hospital for medical treatment. Doctors were discouraged from visiting him at the Embassy. It was as if he were in solitary confinement.

Foreign governments placed immense pressure on Ecuador to allow them to engage in surveillance. Assange was subject to constant watch. He was surveilled in private and with visitors, including family, friends, journalists, lawyers and doctors. His rights to privacy, freedom of speech, legal professional privilege and doctor-patient care were consistently violated. After some years of confinement, his health began to deteriorate.

In 2015, the United Nations Committee on Arbitrary Detention determined that Assange’s confinement inside the Embassy constituted a grave breach of his right to be free from arbitrary detention. It observed that he had been denied the opportunity to defend himself against the Swedish allegations; the duration of his detention had been incompatible with the presumption of innocence; he had been denied the right to contest the necessity and proportionality of his arrest, and his detention for five years had put his health at serious risk.

In a letter to The Lancet, 117 British doctors complained that Julian had been treated cruelly and suffered medical neglect. They said:

“We condemn the torture of Assange. We condemn the denial of his fundamental right to appropriate health care. We condemn the climate of fear surrounding the provision of health care to him. We condemn the violations of his right to doctor-patient confidentiality. Politics cannot be allowed to interfere with the right to health and the practice of medicine.”

Following a change of government in Ecuador in 2018, Assange was dragged by London police from the Ecuadorian Embassy and locked up in Britain’s notorious Belmarsh prison along with the nation’s most dangerous criminals. He had pleaded guilty to breaching bail and was sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment.

After he was detained by the UK, the US Government finally showed its hand. It charged him with 17 counts of violating the US Espionage Act. His ‘espionage’ consisted of releasing the original trove of Iraq/Afghan files. Among other things, these files disclosed alleged war crimes, the deaths of civilians at the hands of American troops, the infliction of torture, arbitrary detention and governmental corruption. Wikileaks had provided crucial information upon which news organisations and citizens around the world could discern the morass of the Middle-East war.

The Espionage Act defines the unauthorised publication of national defence or classified information as a felony. Critically, it does not allow for a public interest defence. That means a jury is barred from taking into account the difference between a whistleblower exposing government crimes to the press, and a spy selling state secrets to a foreign government.

The prosecution constitutes a grave threat to independent journalism. Every national security journalist who reports on US classified information now faces possible espionage charges. It paves the way for the US government to indict other international journalists and publishers. It normalises other countries’ prosecution of journalists as spies.

A few weeks ago, a UK magistrate refused the US Government’s request that Assange be extradited for trial. She did so because of the risk he might suffer grave damage to his mental health. He was not granted bail, however, and remains in Belmarsh.

Assange’s mental state is critically compromised. It was clear, for example, that he could not properly comprehend the nature and content of his extradition hearing late last year. Following a detailed examination of his situation in Belmarsh prison, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment reported that the cumulative effect of his shocking treatment over a decade had constituted psychological torture. His conclusion was damning:

“In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and persecution, I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up deliberately to isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.” 

His detention must end – now.

Read more:

https://johnmenadue.com/western-governments-will-have-blood-on-their-hands-unless-they-stop-persecuting-julian-assange/

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