Is the UK Government hoping that Julian Assange will die of Covid-19 and thus solve its extradition problem? He is reported to be in frail health, and his request for bail to be released from confinement, because of the Covid risk, has been turned down.
117 medical doctors, including several world prominent experts in the field, published a letter in the Lancet warning that Assange’s treatment amounts to torture and that he could die in jail. Should Assange die in a UK prison, as the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has warned, he will effectively have been tortured to death. Much of that torture will have taken place in a prison medical ward, on doctors’ watch. The medical profession cannot afford to stand silently by, on the wrong side of torture and the wrong side of history, while such a travesty unfolds.
From everything I have read about his extradition hearing, being held in Belmarsh Prison, it is a travesty of British justice and more like something one might expect in Russia (either in Soviet days or now).
For example: The International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI) condemns the reported mistreatment of Julian Assange during his United States extradition trial in February 2020, and urges the government of the United Kingdom to take action to protect him. According to his lawyers, Mr Assange was handcuffed 11 times; stripped naked twice and searched; his case files confiscated after the first day of the hearing; and had his request to sit with his lawyers during the trial, rather than in a dock surrounded by bulletproof glass, denied.
It is worth remembering that Julian Assange is a remand prisoner who has served his unprecedentedly long sentence for bail-jumping. His status is supposedly at present that of an innocent man facing charges.
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