Lawyer humiliates Jeremy Hunt at his own event with the hard truth about Julian Assange
On 10 July, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney spoke the truth about Julian Assange, humiliating Jeremy Hunt at his own ‘media freedom’ event.
“Criminalising” journalism
At the Foreign Office’s Defend Media Freedom event in London, Clooney said:
Journalists who expose abuses face arrest, while those who commit the abuses do so with impunity… these problems are global
Shortly after, she continued:
the indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has alarmed journalists at newspapers around the world, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian because, as the editor of the Washington Post has put it, it… ‘criminalises common practices in journalism that have long served the public interest’.
Still, few corporate outlets have covered Clooney’s intervention on WikiLeaks.
“Serious violations”
As Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron has said, the indictment against Assange criminalises “common practices in journalism”, which are related to source protection and story hunting.
Read on...
Support us and go ad-freeYet Conservative leadership contender Hunt, who was sitting across from Clooney, recently said he would hand Julian Assange over to the US, provided he passes through the legal system. And he is foreign secretary in a government persecuting not just Assange, but journalists such as Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney. As Clooney said, these men were:
recently arrested for using a leaked ombudsman report in a documentary alleging police collusion in a murder in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
“Serious violations of his human rights”
On top of the media freedom issue, UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer warned in May that Assange faces a:
real risk of serious violations of his human rights, including his freedom of expression, his right to a fair trial and the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
In the US, the authorities can invoke the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), which means Assange would face a secret trial with no jury.
“Making speeches is not enough”
Clooney also linked the WikiLeaks indictment into a wider picture on journalism:
All governments say they support press freedom; the right is even enshrined in North Korea’s constitution. What matters is enforcement of that right. And enforcement depends on states. So I am grateful to the foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt… for bringing us all here today… But my message to all the ministers who are here is that signing pledges and making speeches is not enough. They must make sure that their laws respect media freedom, and that their police, prosecutors, judges, and citizens do the same.
In the UK, chief magistrate Emma Arbuthnot – the first judge overseeing Assange’s case – has previously thrown WikiLeaks and the UN’s version of events out the window. Hunt’s Conservative colleague Elizabeth Truss appointed Arbuthnot.
Persecuted for exposing wrongdoing
Under Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party is calling for the Conservative government to end its persecution of Assange. At the time of Assange’s arrest in April 2019, shadow home secretary Diane Abbott said:
Julian Assange is not being pursued to protect US national security. He is being pursued because he has exposed wrongdoing by US administrations and their military forces.
Clooney actually brought universal values to the Foreign Office’s media freedom event. It was a breath of fresh air at what has mostly otherwise felt like an Orwellian nightmare. And Hunt did not look happy.
Featured image via Philosoraptor/ YouTube
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I am glad THE CANARY has covered this vitally important development. Have Jeremy Hunt and Chrystia Freeland deigned to comment on this magnificent, and consistent with, the #1689BillofRights principles upon which British standards of justice are based? All of NATO needs to face a moment of truth, and decide: Do the people own information on atrocities that governments wish to hide, or does an unaccountable, lying form of governance have the right to usurp UDHR values in the interest of a weapons culture?
The world has scant resources to refute the culture of violence. During International Year for the Culture of Peace, 2000, we came close to addressing this. NATO countries sidelined the work of UNESCO to codify the tools for making the choice for peace easier than the resort to war and violence. Fortunately, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 has designated #SDG4 as the conduit to pick up on the Culture of Peace as part of upgrading universal education.
The outrage against Julian, who made it possible for an American soldier to practice the Nuremberg Principle, appears to not register in the minds of an oblivious MSM that has no interest in questioning what happens to bring to account those involved with the Collateral Murder massacre. We need to begin working on a LEAGUE for #SDG16 which is the goal – accepted by 193 countries in September of 2015, to de-corrupt dysfunctional institutional systems, so that equal justice can be advanced by healthy institutions.
That goal is waiting for SDG16 action to become aligned with transformative and authentic democratic action.
Thank you AlanB for your comment. We certainly do need a way to de-corrupt our dysfunctional institutional systems. I think that it may be useful for everyone if ordinary people were able to vote on important issues via a secure UN managed website. This may help give the UN more standing and put increased pressure on national governments to behave themselves.
Thank you James Wright for writing this article to clearly demonstrate the reality of the fake concerns our leaders and the mainstream media have for media freedom.
Julian Assange, a journalist, who’s committed no crime, yet currently held in a maximum security prison in the UK on behalf of the US for having exposed serious crimes against humanity while the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer has found that Julian has been subjected to ongoing persecution by the UK, US, Swedish and Ecuadorian governments through the misuse of their own legal systems.
More people need to be aware of what’s really going on. The mainstream media fails to provide accurate and honest information so the people must pay more attention to alternative news sources like theCanary.
I appreciate your comments, GongSteve! I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if the diplomats from the 193 countries who were working on #SDG16, that the maliciously false persecution of Julian was at the top of their minds when they came up with the brilliant wording of that Goal. Only a dysfunctional institutional culture would ignore the crimes of the Collateral Murder incident, and think it better to make death threats and concoct malicious prosecution against the person who facilitated the world knowing about such gratuitous and homicidal violence against the people of Iraq, including the reporters and crew from Reuters.
Has the popular media ever done a story on any discipline of the killers in that gunship massacre? Has any reporter ever questioned why the killers were dreaming up fictions like saying the people on the ground had guns? When nothing in the video looks anything like a gun.
The UN Associations ought to be helping to build #SDG16 as a mechanism for public accountability, where people can organize challenging evidence, and demanding that authorities do their jobs to ensure that laws protecting people are upheld. It is a basic duty under British and American legal canon to protect citizens against violence. https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3172&context=dlj
This is the link to the release where Amal Clooney has released the announcement that the International Expert Panel is being formed. I cannot believe that since July, I am the only one who has made an attempt at commenting. I have posted one today, and I will see if it passes moderation. Where is everyone? Democracy is not a spectator sport, as the great Thom Hartmann always says. http://www.barristermagazine.com/introducing-the-high-level-panel-of-legal-experts-on-media-freedom-amal-clooneys-speech/?unapproved=140&moderation-hash=9804b2a74467795460e2ac83aaf9db45#comment-140
The July 20, 2019, announcement on the Expert Panel that Amal Clooney referred to at the Media Freedom event in London still has not posted any comments yet on this article these many weeks later: http://www.barristermagazine.com/introducing-the-high-level-panel-of-legal-experts-on-media-freedom-amal-clooneys-speech/