In this video, members of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in Australia urge people to join today’s emergency online public meeting to discuss how to fight for the immediate and unconditional freedom of Julian Assange.
The meeting, organised by the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) will be held today, Wednesday December 22 at 7 p.m. (AEDT) and 8 a.m. (GMT). Click here to register.
On December 10—a date that “will go down in infamy”—the UK High Court cleared the legal path for Assange to be extradited to the United States. This pseudo-legal travesty means that the WikiLeaks founder’s life hangs in the balance.
Already, more than a decade of physical confinement and psychological torture has taken its toll. Assange, now 50, suffered a stroke during the court hearings in October, his fiancé Stella Moris has revealed.
Speaking at the meeting will be Thomas Scripps, the Assistant National Secretary of the SEP in the UK. A leading World Socialist Web Site writer on Julian Assange, he reported on the UK High Court hearings. Scripps will be joined by Oscar Grenfell, who is another prominent expert writer for the WSWS on Assange and the national convenor of the IYSSE in Australia.
Assange, an award-winning journalist, and an Australian citizen, is being persecuted for exposing the atrocities, human rights abuses, mass surveillance and other crimes carried out by the US and its allies internationally, including in the imperialist wars and invasions of the Middle East.
For this, Assange has been the victim of a protracted conspiracy involving the US, Swedish, UK and Australian governments. He is being charged under the US Espionage Act—the first time in history a journalist has been charged under that legislation. If extradited, he faces 175 years in prison or even the death penalty.
As the IYSSE members explain, no faith can be placed in the British judicial system or the US, UK and Australian governments. These institutions have all made clear their intent to drag him off to the US. Instead, the demand for Assange’s immediate release must be taken to the broadest possible layers of students, workers and professionals.
Assange’s persecution has been facilitated by the corporate media and the political establishment, as well as the fake left groups. They all backed the false sexual assault allegations against Assange trumped-up by the Swedish authorities as a means of smearing his name and poisoning public opinion.
Since the December 10 ruling, workers and students from Australia and the UK have sent in statements of support to the WSWS, demanding Assange’s freedom. They call for this struggle to be linked to a broader movement of the working class on a socialist and anti-war perspective.
Today’s meeting will discuss the need to connect the fight to free Assange to the rising struggles against the big business policy of “letting rip” the COVID-19 pandemic, the massive levels of social inequality and the drive toward new catastrophic US-led wars.
As the speakers at today’s meeting will explain, the fight for the truth—both on the war crimes and the pandemic—against the official walls of lies, misinformation and cover-up, is vital for the development of these struggles.
We urge all defenders of democratic rights and opponents of imperialist war to participate in the online public meeting today. Click here to register.
Facebook event with more information.