Editors Guild Urges US Govt to Withdraw Charges Against Julian Assange
New Delhi: The Editors Guild of India has issued a statement urging the US to withdraw all charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange "so that this travesty of liberties ends".
The statement by the guild, which was founded in 1978 with the objective of protecting press freedom and raising the standards of editorial leadership of newspapers and magazines, comes days after a judge in the UK ruled that Assange should not be extradited to the US because of fears that he could die by suicide.
The guild further said that over the last decade, Assange had been subjected to persecution and imprisonment "for doing his journalistic duty of bringing truth to power". The statement further claimed that by leading the harassment and intimidation against Assange, the US government had "made a mockery" of freedom of speech is explicitly assured in the US constitution and ought to be a universal democratic practice.
The statement further cautioned that if the charges under the espionage act of ‘publishing documents’ against Assange were not dropped, "it would have implications on how governments all over the world, including India, perceive investigative and national security journalism".
Also read: 'We Have Witnessed the Gradual Killing of Julian Assange', Says WikiLeaks Founder's Father
The guild also expressed concern that the request to extradite Assange was turned down by a British court on grounds of his mental health condition and not for protecting his freedom of speech and exercising his journalistic duty. "The Assange case could have been a path breaker to ensure that individuals exercising their democratic rights are protected against governments they scrutinise," the statement said.
The guild, which is headed by senior journalist Seema Mustafa, called on the US government drop all charges against Assange immediately and allow his release from jail to "uphold media freedom and the larger principles of democracy".
In 2019, the US Justice Department charged Assange on 17 counts, saying he unlawfully published the names of classified sources and conspired with ex-Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in obtaining access to classified information.
Assange has also been charged with conspiring with Manning to gain access to a government computer as part of a 2010 leak by WikiLeaks of hundreds of thousands of US military reports about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If found guilty on all counts, Assange could face a sentence of up to 175 years in prison.
Assange was arrested on April 11, 2019, by British police after he left the Ecuadorean embassy, where he had spent seven years.
A UN expert on torture said that an examination of Assange in a British prison in May 2019 revealed that his incarceration amounted to “psychological torture”.
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