After more than five years in prison, Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks and an award-winning Australian journalist, was released from London’s Belmarsh maximum-security prison after pleading guilty to a single charge under the US Espionage Act.
Assange’s only “crime” was the publication of documents exposing the war crimes and diplomatic intrigues of US imperialism and its allies.
For over a decade, the US, British and Australian governments, with the shameless support of the media and the establishment political parties and trade unions, presided over a relentless campaign of persecution against the journalist. This has involved fabricated allegations of sexual assault and personal slander, conspiracy and spying, and attempts to silence and isolate all those who defend him.
The World Socialist Web Site fought against these allegations to secure Assange’s freedom. Below is a selection of some of the thousands of articles, detailing the events in Assange’s persecution, along with the campaigns and exposures the WSWS carried out in defense of Assange and in opposition to imperialist war.
The Australian government's involvement in the plea deal arrangements was the result of mass popular pressure. It followed years of Labor actively assisting the persecution of Assange.
In a press conference, Stella Assange hailed a global support movement for creating the conditions for Assange's freedom, while warning of an ongoing assault on press freedom that had to be fought.
On Monday, Julian Assange walked out of the UK’s Belmarsh Prison a free man, following five years of imprisonment and nearly 15 years of persecution by a cabal of imperialist governments led by the United States which hounded him for exposing their crimes.
The arrangement represents a massive victory for Assange, whose liberation will be welcomed by defenders of democratic rights and opponents of imperialist war around the world.
On January 16, 2018, the World Socialist Web Site held a discussion on internet censorship, featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges and WSWS International Editorial Board Chairperson David North. Prior to the meeting a message of support for the event was delivered by WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.
At this critical juncture, it is urgently necessary to unite the fight against war with the struggle to free Julian Assange.
While they claim to be defending "democracy" in Ukraine, the US and its allies are persecuting a journalist for exposing their war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The essential task posed before Assange’s supporters is to link his defence to the mass movement emerging in opposition to these crimes. The same eruption of militarism and aggression fuelling the persecution of Assange is producing a mass radicalisation among workers and young people.
If the courageous Vietnam-era whistleblower carried out his actions today, he would undoubtedly face the same fate as Julian Assange: imprisonment and media vilification.
The attempted US extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange resumed yesterday with the opening of a hearing into a US government appeal. It is a legal abomination in pursuit of a heinous crime.
Yesterday’s hearing in London made clear, if any further proof was needed, that the prosecution of Assange is a shameful and degrading show trial, intended to railroad an innocent man to prison or death.
Judge Vanessa Baraitser has decreed that Assange will remain behind bars and that his extradition show-trial will proceed in May, even as the coronavirus pandemic spreads rapidly in British prisons.
This speech was delivered by Thomas Scripps, assistant national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party in Britain, to the 2021 International May Day Online Rally held by the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International.
This speech was delivered by Oscar Grenfell to the 2019 International Online May Day Rally held by the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International
Speakers emphasised that the fight against Israel’s genocide, imperialist war and for the freedom of Assange must be based on the independent mobilisation of the working class against capitalism.
The meeting unanimously passed a resolution condemning the US-led vendetta and demanding Assange’s immediate and unconditional freedom.
Assange’s case embodies the struggle against imperialist war, the authoritarian measures used to suppress anti-war sentiment and the lies used to justify it all.
Lawyer Stephen Kenny warned: "If we don't have people telling us the truth like Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, then we are going to be ignorant. Our democracy is at stake."
The Socialist Equality Party (UK) Congress resolution states, “The international working class must take the lead in the fight to free Assange. It is the sole constituency for the defence of democratic rights, and it alone has the power to wrest the WikiLeaks founder from his captors.”
The case of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is critical to the interests of all workers, in the US and throughout the world.
The international socialist movement and the working class are the decisive force in the fight for Assange’s freedom and the defense of all democratic rights.
This speech was delivered by Socialist Equality Party National Secretary Chris Marsden to a public rally held in London on Sunday, February 23.
SEP national secretary James Cogan addressed a demonstration held in Sydney's Martin Place on March 3, 2019, to demand the Australian government intervene to secure the freedom of persecuted WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
The anniversary is being marked by Assange’s continuing imprisonment and a media blackout of revelations that the American government plotted to assassinate the WikiLeaks founder.
The video exposed the criminality of the Iraq war and had a profound impact on the consciousness of millions of workers and young people the world over.
Amid Democrats’ claims of Russian hacking in support of Trump and Trump’s charge that he was bugged by Obama, WikiLeaks has revealed a vast CIA operation directed against the people of the US and the world.
WikiLeaks contributed to a growing recognition among workers and young people that state criminality and ruling class conspiracies are not accidents or the work of a few bad individuals, but the product of a whole social system based on the rule of competing oligarchies which must be overthrown.
American foreign policy specialists have described the events in Tunisia over the past week as the “first WikiLeaks revolution.”
Beginning with the first Persian Gulf conflict of 1990–91, the United States has been at war continuously for a quarter century. While using propaganda catchphrases, such as “defense of human rights” and “War on Terror,” to conceal the real aims of its interventions in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa, as well as its confrontation with Russia and China, the United States has been engaged in a struggle for global hegemony.
The Nation magazine in the US, with its publication of “The Case of Julian Assange” by columnist Katha Pollitt, has joined the right-wing campaign against the WikiLeaks co-founder.
Ten years after Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange was forced to seek refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and three years after he was arrested and subjected to solitary confinement, the editors and publishers of the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel have issued an open letter calling on US President Joe Biden to end his prosecution.
The Biden administration intends to prosecute Assange for charges under the Espionage Act with a potential sentence of 175 years in prison. This would be served in barbaric conditions, that previous judgements acknowledged could drive him to suicide.
Socialist Alternative’s article, “The betrayal of Julian Assange,” is a crude attempt to cover up its own role in the “betrayal” of the WikiLeaks publisher.
The SWP have joined in the efforts to railroad Assange and blacken his name, justifying a course of action that would end with the WikiLeaks editor facing a show trial in the US.
Despite initially voicing opposition to the attack on Assange, the entire gamut of the middle-class “left” has either ignored, downplayed or supported Assange’s persecution.
The Times’ vilification is aimed at discrediting in advance any information from WikiLeaks exposing the crimes of US imperialism and its favored candidate, Hillary Clinton.
The political and legal attack on Assange represents a qualitative intensification of the destruction of core rights and, indeed, on legality itself as the mode of bourgeois rule.
Floyd Abrams, who played a significant role in the legal defense of the New York Times’ publication of the Pentagon Papers, has endorsed the government’s campaign against WikiLeaks and its editor Julian Assange.
Robert Connolly, director of Underground: The Julian Assange Story, responds to questions from Joanne Laurier of the WSWS.
Robert Connolly discusses Balibo, his latest feature about the military execution of five television reporters in East Timor in 1975.
Julian Assange’s early life is fictionalized by Australian director Robert Connolly, while documentarian Marina Zenovich offers the latest installment in the Roman Polanski saga.
The film broaches a dozen subjects and avoids treating any of them in depth, and often fails to take a clear position of any kind.
“Four Corners” pieced together what happened in the three crucial weeks after the WikiLeaks editor arrived in Sweden in mid-August 2010.
Despite claims by the director and others involved that the film was not conceived as an attack on Assange and WikiLeaks, it is a tendentious work promoting a definite agenda.
Peppered with factual errors and outright falsifications, Gibney’s documentary is an attempt to discredit WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and defend the US intelligence apparatus.
Despite never having been charged with a crime, Sweden’s investigation provided the pseudo-judicial pretext for embroiling Assange in the legal system.
The discrediting of the Swedish investigation, which played a linchpin role in the US-led pursuit of Assange, exposes the lawless character of the entire operation against the WikiLeaks founder.
The DEA makes no appeal to the working class whatsoever, or to any broader layers of the population. It has produced a near hermetically sealed campaign of more or less prominent individuals, held in high regard by each other, who attend each other’s events, and repost each other’s comments.
For the past year, Corbyn has led the suppression of any discussion over Assange’s imprisonment in Britain and the country’s participation in the US-led attempt to destroy him.
Corbyn said nothing when he could have raised Assange’s fate in Parliament every single day, informing millions of the fundamental violation of his democratic rights.
Assange has now spent more than one fifth of his life persecuted by the US state and its allies.
The struggle to free Julian Assange requires an implacable struggle by the working class against the Johnson and Trump governments now conspiring to silence him forever.
The aim of the Don’t Extradite Assange group is to rehabilitate the Labour Party and the trade unions, its “left” representatives in particular, and to corral the movement in defence of Assange under their control.
It is more than two years since a United Nations human rights panel ruled that Assange’s persecution by the Swedish and British governments amounts to “arbitrary detention” and a violation of international law.
