What appeared - at least to onlookers - to be the upholding of the law in Sweden, Britain and the US was the exact reverse: its repeated subversion. The failure to follow basic legal procedures was so consistent, argues Melzer, that it cannot be viewed as simply a series of unfortunate mistakes.
It aims at the "systematic persecution, silencing and destruction of an inconvenient political dissident". (p93)
Assange, in Melzer's view, is not just a political prisoner. He is one whose life is being put in severe danger from relentless abuses that accord with the definition of psychological torture.
Such torture depends on its victim being intimidated, isolated, humiliated, and subjected to arbitrary decisions (p74). Melzer clarifies that the consequences of such torture not only break down the mental and emotional coping mechanisms of victims but over time have very tangible physical consequences too.
Melzer explains the so-called "Mandela Rules" - named after the long-jailed black resistance leader Nelson Mandela, who helped bring down South African apartheid - that limit the use of extreme forms of solitary confinement.
In Assange's case, however, "this form of ill-treatment very quickly became the status quo" in Belmarsh, even though Assange was a "non-violent inmate posing no threat to anyone". As his health deteriorated, prison authorities isolated him further, professedly for his own safety. As a result, Melzer concludes, Assange's "silencing and abuse could be perpetuated indefinitely, all under the guise of concern for his health". (p88-9)
The rapporteur observes that he would not be fulfilling his UN mandate if he failed to protest not only Assange's torture but the fact that he is being tortured to protect those who committed torture and other war crimes exposed in the Iraq and Afghanistan logs published by WikiLeaks. They continue to escape justice with the active connivance of the same state authorities seeking to destroy Assange (p95).
With his long experience of handling torture cases around the world, Melzer suggests that Assange has great reserves of inner strength that have kept him alive, if increasingly frail and physically ill. Assange has lost a great deal of weight, is regularly confused and disorientated, and has suffered a minor stroke in Belmarsh.
Many of the rest of us, the reader is left to infer, might well have succumbed by now to a lethal heart attack or stroke, or have committed suicide.
A further troubling implication hangs over the book: that this is the ultimate ambition of those persecuting him. The current extradition hearings can be spun out indefinitely, with appeals right up to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, keeping Assange out of view all that time, further damaging his health, and providing a stronger deterrent effect on whistleblowers and other journalists.
This is a win-win, notes Melzer. If Assange's mental health breaks down entirely, he can be locked away in a psychiatric institution. And if he dies, that would finally solve the inconvenience of sustaining the legal charade that has been needed to keep him silenced and out of view for so long (p322).
Sweden's charadeMelzer spends much of the book reconstructing the 2010 accusations of sexual assault against Assange in Sweden. He does this not to discredit the two women involved - in fact, he argues that the Swedish legal system failed them as much as it did Assange - but because that case set the stage for the campaign to paint Assange as a rapist, narcissist, and fugitive from justice.
The US might never have been able to launch its overtly political persecution of Assange had he not already been turned into a popular hate figure over the Sweden case. His demonisation was needed - as well as his disappearance from view - to smooth the path to redefining national security journalism as espionage.
Melzer's meticulous examination of the case - assisted by his fluency in Swedish - reveals something that the mainstream media coverage has ignored: Swedish prosecutors never had the semblance of a case against Assange, and apparently never the slightest intention to move the investigation beyond the initial taking of witness statements.
Nonetheless, as Melzer observes, it became "the longest 'preliminary investigation' in Swedish history" (p103).
The first prosecutor to examine the case, in 2010, immediately dropped the investigation, saying, "there is no suspicion of a crime" (p133).
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