The Julian Assange Case & Western Political Repression
Channel: POLITICS IN THE PUB
Date: 2021-03-02

This is an online event that will include a live audience in Sydney's Hotel Harry for the Q&A.

In light of the announcement that the Biden administration will appeal the UK’s refusal to extradite on medical grounds, it is vitally important to discuss Julian Assange’s health, but also to articulate the reasons for counter-appeal by the defence on other aspects of the judgement. According to the defence lawyer Ed Fitzgerald, both scenarios are possible in the High Court.

Prosecutor Clair Dobbin began her preview of the upcoming appeal by saying to Judge Baraitser: "Your judgement hangs by a single thread" - a presumption that the accused would complete a suicide in a US prison. The judge's decision was largely influenced by the expert testimonies of the neuropsychiatrist Prof Michael Kopelman & Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) expert Maureen Baird.

What made the thread so slim was Baraitser's other presumptions - that the words of Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, Gordon Kromberg and Guardian journalists could be accepted as fact; that forensic evidence, such as delivered by Patrick Eller and Christian Grothoff, could be disregarded; and that the First Amendment & Article 10 of the ECHR could be crushed by establishing dual criminality between the Espionage and Official Secrets Acts.

Panel
Felicity Ruby (Ed.) will chair the discussion. She is a PhD candidate at Sydney University undertaking research on surveillance and democracy. She was advisor to Scott Ludlam for his first six years in the Australian Senate. Prior to this she headed the UN Office for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and was a policy adviser at the UN Development Fund for Women and at Greenpeace International.

Scott Ludlam is a former Australian politician. A member of the Australian Greens, he served in the Australian Senate from July 2008 to July 2017, and as Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens from 2015 to 2017. In his capacity as Communications spokesperson for the Greens, he campaigned for the right of WikiLeaks to publish without fear of reprisal.

Joe Lauria: Editor-in-chief of DC-based Consortium News, who covered the Assange case daily from London and the virtual courtroom);

Nigel Parry: Journalist and technical consultant who covered the lead-up to the release of the un-redacted cables and was actually the first person to decrypt them and warn Wikileaks. His account at the time tallies with computer scientist Christian Grothoff's expert testimony, but it tells us more about who made the release possible - and it wasn't Assange. Parry will also comment on the recently released call between Wikileaks and the DoJ (in the interest of preventing or delaying that release) and the implications the Assange case has for press freedom.

Doctors for Assange will be represented by Professor Thomas G. Schulze and Professor William Hogan.
Professor Thomas G. Schulze is Chair and Director of the Institute of Psychiatric Phenomics and Genomics (www.ippg.eu) at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich (IPPG). He is a research affiliate with the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, MD, and on Faculty with the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. In 2019, he also joined the Faculty of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences of SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, NY, USA, where he holds an appointment as Clinical Professor.
Professor William Hogan, MD is Professor of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida. He is first author on Doctors For Assange's second letter to the Lancet, published online on the eve of International Victims of Torture Day and in print on the 4th of July.