He lost his freedom in 2010. Ever since he revealed secret U.S. documents exposing war crimes and torture, Julian Assange has not known freedom, and he has spent the last four years, since April 11, 2019, incarcerated in Britain’s harshest prison, Belmarsh. He is an innocent man awaiting extradition to the United States, where he risks being entombed forever in a maximum-security prison for his journalistic work, unless the British courts or the European Court of Human Rights rule against his extradition in the upcoming months, or worldwide public opinion stops it through pressure on US and UK politicians. Julian Assange’s life hangs in the balance. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has followed his case very closely, and last week RSF’s Secretary General, Christophe Deloire, and its director of campaigns, Rebecca Vincent, tried to visit him in Belmarsh, but the prison authorities did not allow them in. Il Fatto Quotidiano sat down for an interview with Vincent.
You had asked for permission before visiting him, hadn’t you?
Yes, we went through the vetting process, which took a very long time. In fact I had been wanting to visit him in prison for so long, but it wasn’t possible for two years because of the pandemic. There are many rules, there are certain times, certain days. So we booked and we got confirmation on the 21st of March that we would have a visit on the 4th of April, at 9.15 a.m.. We turned up nice and early, with all our documents, we had read all the rules. We were there probably an hour before our visit, we went to reception, and without even checking our documents we were told that no, we wouldn’t be allowed in.
They said – this is my favourite part – that they had “received intelligence” that we are journalists, and therefore would not be allowed in. We said “OK, there must be a misunderstanding. RSF is an NGO, we are here as an NGO, we are following the prison’s rules, we are visiting him as any of his other visitors would.” But they said the decision was taken by the prison governor and the only thing we could do was to write a complaint to an email address they gave us. I asked, several times, ‘could we speak to the prison governor? This is urgent, we would like to resolve this, we would like to visit him.’ We were on the list, by the way, with Stella [Assange’s wife], who came, and she did get in, but she wasn’t there when all this happened, she got there a bit later. She was allowed in as normal, but we were supposed to go in together with her. Anyway, we tried many things on the spot to resolve the situation, but it wasn’t possible, they wouldn’t speak to us further about it.
We did write an email to the complaint address, an urgent one. We called Julian’s lawyers, we tried several things. But it was early in the morning, and no one could reach the prison governor. At one point I went back to the same officials at the reception, and tried to ask again, and one of them said ‘how can you say you’re not a journalist when you are going out to speak to the media outside?’ and I said ‘that’s a different thing!’ Because we did send out a media advisory; we had organised for journalists to meet us outside the prison at 11.15 a.m., because we were going to be the first NGO to visit Julian in prison, and then we were going to comment to media. So maybe they got spooked by the fact that there were press outside after our visit. But there have been others who come out from their visits and speak to the media, so that isn’t grounds to bar our access, in fact that’s not legal. Nor does the fact that we are speaking to the media constitute evidence that we are journalists.
Did you want to assess his health as well?
Absolutely, because we are concerned about him. We know that he has a range of mental health issues, and that he has had physical health difficulties in prison too. So yes, one reason we want to see him is to assess his conditions. Remember, he has not been outside of prison since the bail hearing on the 6th of January 2021. I was in court that day, so I saw him. He was in Westminster Magistrate Court, he was in a glass box on the other side of the room, but that is a small courtroom, so I had a pretty good look at him that day. That was the last time he was even allowed to attend court. After that, they only let him attend via videolink from prison. And sometimes on the videolink he looked very unwell, including in October 2021, and we know now that he had a ministroke in prison in October 2021. Anyway, nobody has seen him outside of those walls in over two years, and he has had so few visitors. It was completely prohibited during Covid. Now he can visit with his family; Stella says that she usually gets two visits a week, and she often brings the kids. Sometimes other family members visit, and he has had a handful of other visitors, but very few in the 4 years he has been in Belmarsh. So they have just completely isolated him. We are concerned about his well being; we want to see him. And we want to speak to him about his case, and we should be able to.
The whole purpose is to isolate him, to break him down and make him disappear from the radar of public opinion…
It would seem so. And I also note that on our side, in all the work that we at Reporters Without Borders have done on this case here in the UK, we always hit these ridiculous barriers. I know there are different parts, different structures, but they are all barriers put up by British authorities in some way. You know about our saga of difficulty getting into the court all throughout, right? And it’s kind of ironic, because the problems I had with getting into court were precisely because I am not a journalist. They didn’t really know how to handle NGO observers, and the court determined we weren’t any different from the public, so I had to fight for a place in the public gallery. Judge Baraitser revoked access to the videolink for NGOs, so the only way I could get information from court was to get into the public gallery in person. Anyway, every single part of the extradition process was a battle to get in; it was something different every time. They made it nearly impossible to get into court. So court was nearly impossible. And the same has been the case with some ‘Free Assange’ petitions we have done, we’ve actually done a few of them over the years, but when we tried to deliver them to the British government, they wouldn’t accept delivery. We tried to take one with Stella in September 2020, when the evidentiary portion of the trial started. We tried to deliver a petition to Downing Street, but they wouldn’t take it. Then last summer we tried to deliver it, we went to the Home Office, and they wouldn’t take it. It’s like every time we interact with any level of UK authorities on this case, they default to secrecy and to not engaging and to just making it really difficult for us to do our normal jobs as press freedom defenders. So what is it about this case? What do they have to hide?
Have you experienced these kinds of difficulties in authoritarian states, like in China or Russia, when you were following the case of journalists who had been arrested?
I don’t think we can really make direct comparisons, because I haven’t tried to get into a prison in those countries, not as Reporters Without Borders. I’ve been in prisons before, after all I’m a former diplomat, but that’s a different role. So I can’t make a direct comparison about the prison issue, but I will say that just in terms of engaging in the case, the hearing of the extradition process was certainly the hardest case to access in all my career. Sure, some of it was because of restrictions related to the pandemic, but even during the pandemic I travelled and got into trials without any problems in Turkey, in Malta. Those aren’t exactly Russia or China, but Turkey is not known for its stellar press freedom record, or adherence to the rule of law, yet they have always allowed us NGO observers into various courts, for example. I will also say that it matters a lot; that our democracies lead by example, and so this is one reason why we campaign in Julian’s case as a global priority. The US and the UK should be doing better. We should not only hold ourselves to the same standard, but we should have a higher standard than countries which do not have respect for press freedom or the rule of law. Julian Assange has become the most well-known political prisoner in a democracy in the world. As long as he not only remains in prison, but as long as this case against him remains open, it will be a thorn in the side of the US government and of the UK which is holding him. It undermines their ability and their legitimacy to advocate for other cases in other parts of the world. We can’t undo what has already been done, but it is time to put this to a stop now, to show that they mean what they say when it comes to media freedom. And that will help their efforts to advocate for other cases, including the new case of Evan Gershkovich in Moscow.