Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

There is a certain irony that Time magazine's person of the year announced yesterday are journalists when there has not been a single mention of the increasingly precarious situation facing Julian Assange. The Government has a responsibility to raise this case in the upcoming European Council. In a fortnight Assange will have spent his seventh Christmas trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. For six and a half years he has been corralled there by the British Government and refused safe passage to asylum to Ecuador. He is now an Ecuadorian citizen and still the British Government refuses to let him leave in safety. The threats to his life and health grow bigger every day.

Since the election of President Moreno in Ecuador last year, Julian Assange's presence in the Ecuadorian embassy has grown increasingly precarious. President Moreno has described Assange as a stone in his shoe. The former president, Mr. Correa, has said that President Moreno would throw Assange out following the first pressure from the United States, which is exactly what we are seeing. In November the US Department of Justice accidentally revealed the existence of sealed criminal charges against Assange in a document filed in a New York court. That document read:

The complaint...and arrest warrant...would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter.

We must remember that this threat of extradition to the US and a lifetime of solitary confinement or worse hang over Julian Assange because he had the audacity to commit acts of actual journalism. He had the audacity to refuse to become just another stenographer of the powerful like so many of his colleagues because he made available information that threatened the United States' imperial project, information that upset the liberal consensus of Western good guys and the big bad others that we hear about so much, information that was raw, genuine and direct from the source and not spoon-fed by spokespersons or laundered by PR.

He is now facing criminal charges in the United States because in 2010 he published the collateral murder video which showed US forces gunning down 12 civilians, including two journalists, in an airstrike and laughing about it. He is facing criminal charges and a lifetime in solitary confinement in a supermax prison because a few months later WikiLeaks published the Afghan war logs, followed by the Iraq war logs, the biggest leak in the history of the United States military. The Iraq war logs proved that the US Government had covered up 15,000 civilian deaths in Iraq and the US authorities had failed to investigate hundreds of cases of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers who killed hundreds of unarmed civilians some of them pregnant women for the crime of approaching checkpoints.

In light of Assange's contribution to journalism, it is grim and shocking how easily the United States along with its allies in the UK have manipulated both left and right wing mainstream opinion in regard to his character and his work. We have had a relentless propaganda campaign over the years resulting in the apparently universally recognised idea in the mainstream that his detention is really not something to worry about. It is regarded as not being that important because it is suggested he is unstable, irresponsible, creepy etc. which is exactly why I am raising it today. Human rights do not depend on character references.

The world's media were rightly up in arms over the horrific murder of Jamal Khashoggi on the basis that state-backed attacks on dissident journalists represent a red line that should never be crossed. I agree with that. However, if Assange is ever talked about in these days it is never in the context of his arbitrary detention and rather in the context of the smears against his character, which is absolute hypocrisy when we see the outcry at the treatment of Jamal Khashoggi and so on. A journalist has been arbitrarily detained for six and a half years with no apparent discomfort from any section of the establishment anywhere. I again ask the Government to raise this case before this man dies inside that embassy. If they get him out he faces a lifetime in solitary confinement in America.

In the context of journalists, there is hypocrisy between how we raise the case of Jamal Khashoggi while at the same time refusing to countenance arms boycotts on Saudi Arabia as it slaughters and starves innocent Yemeni civilians. That has gone on for three years and suddenly now following that murder everybody in Europe wants to talk about it. They did not care about it when thousands of Yemeni people were being killed - yesterday the media quoted a figure of 60,000. I appeal to the Government to speak up before it is too late for Julian Assange.

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