DC Belmarsh Tribunal Urges Biden to Drop Assange Charges

Seeking to pressure the Biden administration into dropping charges against jailed Australian WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, human rights and press freedom defenders gathered in Washington, D.C. over the weekend for the second U.S. session of the Belmarsh Tribunal.

The tribunal—organized by Progressive International in partnership with the Wau Holland Foundation—was held Saturday at the National Press Club, where Assange first premiered "Collateral Murder," a video showing a U.S. Army helicopter crew killing a group of Iraqi civilians and then laughing about it.

"As long as the Espionage Act is deployed to imprison those who expose war crimes, no publisher and no journalist will be safe. It is time to free the truth."

The Belmarsh Tribunal was first convened in London in 2021. The event is inspired by the Russell Tribunal, a 1966 event organized by philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre to hold the U.S. accountable for its escalating war crimes in Vietnam.

Saturday's gathering was co-hosted by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and The Intercept D.C. bureau chief Ryan Grim.

"Believe it or not, there are only two persons in the world who have been punished for the war crimes that were revealed by WikiLeaks: Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange," Grim told attendees.

Srećko Horvat, the Croatian author, philosopher, and activist who co-founded the Belmarsh Tribunal, said that "the pressure is mounting on the Biden administration to free Julian Assange."

"More than one man's life is at stake, but the First Amendment and freedom of the press itself," he added. "As long as the Espionage Act is deployed to imprison those who expose war crimes, no publisher and no journalist will be safe. It is time to free the truth."

Rebecca Vincent, director of campaigns at Reporters Without Borders, warned that "if the U.S. government succeeds to extradite Julian Assange to this country, he will become the first publisher imprisoned under the Espionage Act—but he will not be the last."

According to Progressive International:

U.S. congresspeople from both parties are lobbying U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and President Joe Biden to stop pursuing Assange under the Espionage Act. At the same time, Australian members of Parliament are making a major bipartisan push to demand the U.S. Justice Department end its legal campaign against Australian national Assange.

Assange—who suffers from physical and mental health problems including heart and respiratory issues—published classified materials, many of them provided by Manning, exposing U.S. and allied nations' war crimes, including the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and "Collateral Murder."

Since Assange's apprehension 13 years ago in London, he has been confined for seven years in the Ecuadorean Embassy while he was protected by the administration of former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, and jailed in the U.K. capital's maximum-security Belmarsh Prison. He's currently being held on remand in the notorious lockup pending extradition to the United States after the U.K. High Court rejected his final appeal earlier this year.

If fully convicted, Assange—who is 52 years old and is married with two children—could be sentenced to up to 175 years behind bars.

"How is it acceptable that perpetrators of the illegal invasion of Iraq are the ones who get to decide if the man who exposed their crimes is a journalist?" asked American journalist Abby Martin during the event.

Pivoting to Israel's current war on Gaza—which many experts and observers around the world are calling a genocide as over 70,000 Palestinians have been killed, maimed, or left missing and 80% of the strip's population has been forcibly displaced—Martin asserted that "the people of Gaza have risked and lost their lives to expose the war crimes of the U.S. and Israel."

"The people of Iraq did not have that chance," she added. "They had WikiLeaks."