The British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, will decide this month whether Julian Assange is to be extradited to the United States, where he faces a sentence of up to 175 years - served most likely in strict, 24-hour isolation in a US super-max jail.
He has already spent three years in similarly harsh conditions in London's high-security Belmarsh prison.
The 18 charges laid against Assange in the US relate to the publication by WikiLeaks in 2010 of leaked official documents, many of them showing that the US and UK were responsible for war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one has been brought to justice for those crimes.
Instead, the US has defined Assange's journalism as espionage - and by implication asserted a right to seize any journalist in the world who takes on the US national security state - and in a series of extradition hearings, the British courts have given their blessing.
The lengthy proceedings against Assange have been carried out in courtrooms with tightly restricted access and in circumstances that have repeatedly denied journalists the ability to cover the case properly.
Despite the grave implications for a free press and democratic accountability, however, Assange's plight has provoked little more than a flicker of concern from much of the western media.
Few observers appear to be in any doubt that Patel will sign off on the US extradition order - least of all Nils Melzer, a law professor, and a United Nations' special rapporteur.
In his role as the UN's expert on torture, Melzer has made it his job since 2019 to scrutinise not only Assange's treatment during his 12 years of increasing confinement - overseen by the UK courts - but also the extent to which due process and the rule of law have been followed in pursuing the WikiLeaks founder.
Melzer has distilled his detailed research into a new book, 'The Trial of Julian Assange', that provides a shocking account of rampant lawlessness by the main states involved - Britain, Sweden, the US, and Ecuador. It also documents a sophisticated campaign of misinformation and character assassination to obscure those misdeeds.
The result, Melzer concludes, has been a relentless assault not only on Assange's fundamental rights but his physical, mental, and emotional well being that Melzer classifies as psychological torture.
The UN rapporteur argues that the UK has invested far too much money and muscle in securing Assange's prosecution on behalf of the US, and has too pressing a need itself to deter others from following Assange's path in exposing western crimes, to risk letting Assange walk free.
It has instead participated in a wide-ranging legal charade to obscure the political nature of Assange's incarceration. And in doing so, it has systematically ridden roughshod over the rule of law.
Melzer believes Assange's case is so important because it sets a precedent to erode the most basic liberties the rest of us take for granted. He opens the book with a quote from Otto Gritschneder, a German lawyer who observed up close the rise of the Nazis, "those who sleep in a democracy will wake up in a dictatorship".
Back to the wallMelzer has raised his voice because he believes that in the Assange case any residual institutional checks and balances on state power, especially those of the US, have been subdued.
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