20-02-20 08:27:00,
Continued persecution of the WikiLeaks co-founder is a “crazy situation,” Australian lawmaker George Christiansen told RT, adding that Julian Assange did not commit any crime aside from running afoul of US elites.
Christiansen, a member of the Liberal National Party of Queensland, questioned the integrity of the legal process against Assange, who is now facing the possibility of extradition to the US over “unlawfully obtaining and disclosing classified documents related to the national defense.”
The journalist was hauled out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London after his asylum was revoked in April 2019, and has been locked up at the maximum security Belmarsh prison ever since.
“We have an Australian citizen, who is a subject to our laws, extradited by one foreign nation into another on charges in accordance with the laws of a country he did not even set foot to. That is a crazy situation,” Christiansen said, after visiting Assange at Belmarsh, south of London.
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If a British citizen faced extradition from a third country to China or another “adversary” of the West, London would spare no efforts seeking his or her release, he added. “The same is true for Assange.”
The extradition hearings should be dropped and he should be returned to Australia.
Having been a journalist himself, Christiansen said that he sees absolutely no crime in Assange’s actions, since he was just “reporting the facts” and revealing information that was “clearly of public interest.”
I do not believe that anyone must be locked up for such an alleged crime. It is not a crime to undertake journalism.
Christiansen has spoken to the UN special rapporteur on torture, Professor Nils Melzer, who has repeatedly raised the alarm about Assange’s health, arguing that his solitary confinement in Belmarsh essentially amounted to psychological torture. What he saw at Belmarsh convinced Christiansen that Melzer was right in this assessment. He particularly noted that Assange “exhibited signs of disorientation” and told Christiansen about his prolonged and “severe” isolation.