Andrew Wilkie and George Christensen in London to visit Julian Assange, as Jeremy Corbyn says UK view on extradition is shifting
"Kerry O'Brien uses Walkey Awards speech to rally journalists, saying press 'freedom is eroded gradually' "Australia’s Media Raids and the Decline of Press Freedom Worldwide" "
Photo: Andrew Wilkie (left) met with the British Opposition Leader ahead of visiting Julian Assange at Belmarsh Prison. (ABC News: Andrew Greaves)
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British Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn says he is surprised over what he sees as a shift in the British Government's position on Julian Assange and the UK's "unbalanced" extradition relationship with the United States.
Key points:
* Australian MPs have arrived in London ahead of prison meeting with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
* Andrew Wilkie has met with UK Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn
* Mr Corbyn believes the UK Government's view on its "unbalanced" extradition treaty with the US has shifted
Mr Corbyn made the comments after a meeting with Australian independent MP Andrew Wilkie, who is in London on a privately funded trip to visit the WikiLeaks founder in prison.
The Labour leader told the ABC that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's answers to House of Commons questions about the extradition deal the UK had with the US last Wednesday (local time) were unexpected.
"He accepted that it is an unbalanced treaty and it is not a fair one, therefore I think that is a big change by the British Government," Mr Corbyn said.
In the House, Mr Corbyn had argued that the UK had a "one-sided extradition treaty" with the US and asked Mr Johnson to commit to an "equal and balanced" future relationship.
"I do think that there are elements of that relationship that are unbalanced and I certainly think it is worth looking at," Mr Johnson replied.
He said it was also unexpected that Mr Johnson did not argue against him when he questioned whether it was right that someone should be deported for exposing the truth.
"The Prime Minister did not challenge my assertions on this, but seems to me to understand that there is a principle here that somebody who opens up and tells the truth, as Julian Assange has done, should not face deportation to the United States," Mr Corbyn said.
Assange 'abandoned by Australian Government'
Mr Wilkie plans to visit Assange in Belmarsh Prison on Tuesday afternoon (local time), along with Queensland federal MP George Christensen, who is also in London.
Photo: Andrew Wilkie is one of 14 MPs in the Bring Assange Home parliamentary group. (ABC News: Andrew Greaves)
"I want to convey a message to Julian that although he has been abandoned by the Australian Government, although he seems to have no support from the British Government or the US Government, he does in fact have a lot of support from millions of people right around the world," Mr Wilkie told the ABC.
Mr Wilkie described the case against Assange as scandalous.
"Let's not forget the substantive issue here, and that's that an Australian citizen has publicised a range of important information in the public interest, including hard evidence of US war crimes, and his reward for doing that is facing extradition," he said.
Ahead of the visit to the prison, Mr Christensen said he wanted to check on Assange's welfare to inform the Government back home.
"For me to be a bit parochial, he's a North Queenslander, he is someone who is facing potentially the rest of his life behind bars for simply wanting to publish and publishing the truth," Mr Christensen said.
Photo: Queensland Nationals MP George Christensen says he wants to check on Assange's condition inside the prison. (ABC News: Tim Stevens)
"That is wrong, that is morally and ethically wrong, and you've got to be in these fights if you believe in free speech and free press."
[INSERT: Ban the burqa, cut immigration, stop same-sex marriage and reject climate change: the battlegrounds of George Christensen, often the Australian government's most divisive MP. How did a poverty-stricken, shoeless kid grow up to champion the ultra-right? https://www.sbs.com.au/topics/life/feature/george-controversies-australian-government-mp ]
'Family is everything'
Assange's father John Shipton will facilitate the meeting at the high-security Belmarsh Prison in south-west London.
Mr Shipton moved to London three months ago to be closer to his son and to support and lobby on behalf of the 48-year-old.
There is a strong resemblance between the 75-year old and his son. A father cradles his young daughter in a living room.
Photo: John Shipton, Julian Assange's father, is in London with his daughter to support his son and his battle against extradition. (ABC News: Andrew Greaves)
Mr Shipton told the ABC he brought his four-year-old daughter to London because he wanted to show the world Assange was surrounded by family.
"I brought her to see Julian," he said.
"I think the family gathering together and coming to see Julian will help him through this crisis and show people that Julian is not isolated, to show that family is everything.
"Without family you can't defend yourself against the oppressions or winds of fate blowing in the wrong direction."
Mr Shipton said he believed his son would not survive if he was jailed in the US.
"They didn't go through 10 years of persecution to take him over there and put him in a feather bed," he said.
Crunch time approaching for Assange
In less than a week's time, Assange will face the legal might of the United States Government, which will argue for his extradition in a court near Belmarsh Prison, where he has been incarcerated since last year.
Photo: Julian Assange has been in prison since his arrest at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in April last year. (PA: Victoria Jones via AP)
His own legal team say if the Americans succeed, he will not receive a fair trial and will be jailed for up to 175 years.
The WikiLeaks founder is facing 18 charges — 17 under the espionage act — for conspiracy to receive, obtain and disclose classified information.
Much of the information related to the US prosecution of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Who can forget that shocking image of American attack helicopters gunning down Iraqi civilians and journalists in the streets in Iraq?" Mr Wilkie said.
"This stuff matters. We should not be persecuting Julian Assange."
Conservative British MP Bob Seely disagreed. He argued publishing the information was a crime.
"If you don't want to do the time, don't do the crime," he told the ABC outside the UK Parliament in Westminster.
Mr Seely's grievance also relates to the alleged manipulation of the 2016 US presidential election.
In that year, WikiLeaks obtained and released emails and other documents from the Clinton presidential campaign.
"It was pretty obvious reading the indictments put down by [former special counsel for the US Department of Justice] Robert Mueller that WikiLeaks was used wittingly or unwittingly, knowingly or not, as a vehicle by which the Russians hacked into the Democratic Congress servers and stole lots of information," Mr Seely said.
"I think Assange has been a useful idiot for people to attack liberal democracies."
The extradition hearing will last a month in total, but the trial will be split, with one week to begin on January 24 and the remaining proceedings taking place in May.
Defence lawyers for Assange have told preliminary hearings most of the witnesses they wish to call will give evidence anonymously, although the US counsel has already indicated they will argue to have them struck off.
For now, Mr Shipton will continue to call London home.
"Julian's circumstance is dire," he said.
"It's very awkward to speak about it. It just upsets me."
"The best thing is to take each day as it comes and work as well and as hard as you can on ensuring that your children aren't oppressed and aren't persecuted to death."
Julian Assange is no journalist: don't confuse his arrest with press freedom [...] Other documents included the Afghanistan War Logs, the Iraq War Logs, and "CableGate" – a trove of classified diplomatic cables that contained some embarrassingly undiplomatic analysis of world leaders and their countries. So far so newsworthy. P - But Assange went further. Instead of sorting through the hundreds of thousands of files to seek out the most important or relevant and protect the innocent, he dumped them all onto his website, free for anybody to go through, regardless of their contents or the impact they might have had. Some exposed the names of Afghans who had been giving information on the Taliban to US forces. P - Journalism demands more than simply acquiring confidential information and releasing it unfiltered onto the internet for punters to sort through. It comes with responsibility. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=148215354
Kevin Rudd petition calls for royal commission into News Corp domination of Australian media
"Kerry O'Brien uses Walkey Awards speech to rally journalists, saying press 'freedom is eroded gradually' "Australia’s Media Raids and the Decline of Press Freedom Worldwide""
Petition set up by the former PM caused problems for the Parliament House website after more than 38,000 people signed in 24 hours
The former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd has launched a petition to establish a royal commission into diversity in the media. Photograph: Joel Carrett/AAP
Elias Visontay and Australian Associated Press @EliasVisontay
Sun 11 Oct 2020 11.22 AEDT Last modified on Sun 11 Oct 2020 20.42 AEDT
The former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd .. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/kevin-rudd .. has launched a petition calling for a royal commission into NewsCorp’s dominance of Australia media, arguing Rupert Murdoch’s media company employs tactics that “chill free speech and undermine public debate”.
The petition [Australian citizens only] .. https://www.aph.gov.au/petition_list?id=EN1938 , launched on the Australian Parliament website on Saturday, had gained more than 38,000 signatures by Sunday morning, with Rudd tweeting that the popularity of the petition had caused the website to suspect users signing it were robots.
On Sunday the Labor leader Anthony Albanese distanced himself from the push.
Albanese told reporters in Adelaide that Rudd, as a former prime minister, was entitled to call for a royal commission but he did so as a “private citizen” and the idea was not Labor policy.
A screenshot of the parliament website warning of technical issues on the page of a petition launched by former prime minister Kevin Rudd calling for an inquiry into media diversity. Photograph: Australian Parliament House website
While the petition calls for a royal commission “to ensure a strong, diverse Australian news media” in the face of “new business models that encourage deliberately polarising and politically manipulated news”, Rudd posted a video to Twitter launching the petition that focused on “growing anger at what the Murdoch media monopoly is doing to our country”.
However it is unlikely the petition will be acted on by the federal government because Australia – unlike other governments, including the UK – has no threshold of signatures that requires a petition to be debated in parliament.
Explaining how he arrived at his current view of the media empire – which includes the Australian and several newspapers that endorsed him at the 2007 federal election – Rudd said the company’s mastheads had become an “arrogant cancer” on the country’s democracy.
“The truth is Murdoch has become a cancer, an arrogant cancer, on our democracy,” Rudd said.
He said 70% of Australia’s print readership was owned by Murdoch and he owned virtually every newspaper in Queensland “which swings so many federal election outcomes”.
Over the past decade, in 18 out of 18 federal and state elections, “Murdoch has viciously campaigned in support of one side of politics, the Liberal National party, and viciously campaigned against the Australian Labor party,” Rudd said.
“There’s no such thing as a level playing field any more.”
Rudd said Murdoch retained loss-making newspapers in Australia to maximise his political power in defence of climate change denial, and pursue his commercial interests in relation to the national broadband network.
“The final reason we need this royal commission is the sheer arrogance and swagger and bullying behaviour by Murdoch and his editors against anybody who stands up against him or has a different point of view.”
A Department of Parliamentary Services spokeswoman told Guardian Australia: “The APH ePetitions site has had an unusually high number of page views in the last 24 hours. There have been intermittent timing-out problems caused by this volume and changes have been made to increase capacity.”
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