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On Friday, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador called for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to be released from prison in London, urging an end to what he described as his “ torture ” in detention.
Assange, 48, is in a British jail for skipping bail when he sought asylum in Ecuador’s embassy in London, where he spent nearly seven years to avoid extradition to Sweden over allegations of rape that were dropped in November .
Assange is also battling U.S. attempts to extradite him over Wikileaks’ publication of vast caches of leaked military documents and diplomatic cables . He faces a lengthy prison term if extradited to the United States.
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Last year, a U.N. human rights investigator said Assange has suffered psychological torture from a defamation campaign and should not be extradited to the United States where he would face a “politicized show trial.”
López Obrador, a leftist who has close ties with Britain’s opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn , expressed his solidarity with Assange and said he hoped the former hacker and activist is “forgiven and released” from prison.
“I don’t know if he has recognized that he acted against rules and norms of a political system , but at the time these cables demonstrated how the world system functions in its authoritarian nature,” López Obrador said in response to a question about Assange at a regular government news briefing.
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“Hopefully consideration will be given to this, and he’s released and won’t continue to be tortured .”
Assange’s presence in London , holed up in Ecuador’s embassy and then in jail, has been a diplomatic irritation for Britain, affecting domestic politics and relations with several countries.
Corbyn
, who was a guest of honor at López Obrador’s inauguration in December 2018 , said Assange should not be extradited to the United States “ for exposing evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan .”
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson
, whose Conservative Party trounced Labour in last month’s elections, has vowed to strike new trade deals with countries outside Europe after Britain’s departure from the European Union .
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is in a court battle against extradition?
Assange faces 18 counts in the U.S. including conspiring to hack government computers and violating an espionage law . He could spend decades in prison if convicted.
Australian-born Assange came to prominence when WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables in 2010 , angering Washington which said he had put lives at risk.
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His supporters hail him as a hero for exposing what they describe as abuse of power by modern states and for championing free speech .
He spent almost seven years holed up in cramped rooms at the Ecuadorean embassy in London where he fled in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden where he was wanted for questioning over allegations of rape. He was dragged from the embassy on April 11 and jailed for 50 weeks for skipping bail.
The detention in London of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange , who is facing extradition to the United States is a historic episode in the struggle for freedom of information in the digital era , with serious consequences on journalism’s future across the world.
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Beyond the untenable accusations of sex abuse against the Australian editor in Sweden, as well as the U.S. charges of conspiracy to steal government information, it is evident that the persecution of Assange started nine years ago after WikiLeaks published the Collateral Murder video , revealing a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack in Iraq that killed around 20 civilians, including two Reuters journalists.
This video was followed by the Afghanistan War Logs , a collection of 91,000 military documents published by The Guardian , The New York Times , and Der Spiegel which the U.S. newspaper described as “a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents.”
In the same vein, the disclosure of 391,832 U.S. Army field reports in the Iraq War Logs showed, according to The Guardian , that “U.S. authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse , torture , rape , and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers.”
For its part, the 251,287 diplomatic cables from the U.S. State Department contained in the “ Cablegate ” shook world opinion and changed the way society thinks about foreign relations.
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