Europe, Justice & Press Freedom: The Case of Julian Assange"
The EU Free Assange Rally to be held on April 23rd 2022 in Brussels will be the major event this
year in support of Julian Assange, the investigative journalist and founder of Wikileaks now jailed
in Belmarsh Prison, London.
The rally to #FreeAssange and make clear that #JournalismIsNotACrime will take place in
Brussels' central square, Place de la Monnaie. Promoted by the activists of Free Assange Wave, the
event has the support of such major organizations as Reporters Sans Frontiers, Amnesty
International, the International Federation of Journalists and Don't Extradite Assange.
Among the principal speakers will be Jeremy Corbyn, former Icelandic Minister of Justice and Human Rights Ögmundur Jónasson and the
British academic and legal expert Dr. Deepa Driver, who will denounce the silence surrounding the
Assange case as "cowardly" and "a betrayal of the values upon which modern Europe was built and
that inspire Western democratic Constitutions".
The world-famous Chicks on Speed Music Ensemble, David Rovics & Jack O´Shea will offer a
free Open-Air Concert with songs composed for Julian Assange, while the artist collective Captain
Borderline executes - in real time - the drawing Collateral Crucifixion. In the evening there will
be the screening of Clara Lopez and Juan Pancorbo's film Hacking Justice, the story of Assange's
decade-long struggle to avoid political persecution and deportation to the United States in
retaliation for his publishing activities. The book store Tropismes will host a stall featuring Nils
Melzer's book The Trial of Julian Assange and several other publications regarding persecuted
whistleblowers.
"The EU Free Assange Rally will be a massive event that European and American leaders will
have to reckon with," say the organizers. "This is because it squarely raises the question of citizens'
right to know, the foundation of press freedom and our very democracy."
"We, the people, stand by Assange," the organizers add, "and we believe that the EU has both the
power and the duty to take a stand for him alongside us. Although European leaders have been
mostly keeping quiet, we will be calling on them, from the central square in Brussels, to stand up
and make their voices heard now. They must not tolerate that the founder of WikiLeaks remains
incarcerated even though he is not serving a sentence. And, what is more, incarcerated at Belmarsh,
the UK maximum security prison that many have called the British Guantanamo! There, deprived
of his partner and their two young children, Assange is fighting extradition to a country whose
intelligence agency drew up plans to either kidnap or assassinate him, after he published Vault 7 on
his WikiLeaks site. Vault 7 is a set of documents revealing how the CIA targets our smartphones
and turns them into devices for spying on each and every one of us. Exposing this illegality is
clearly an act of investigative journalism in the public interest, not a crime."
Preparing the way for the rally will be:
- a webinar on March 24th at 7.30 pm (CET), hosted by "Don't Extradite Assange". Featuring
several of the speakers and artists who will be present at the rally, the webinar will give a taste of
what to expect on April 23rd;
- a lecture on Friday, April 22nd, at 7.30 pm (CET), held at the Free University Brussels (ULB).
The talk by Dr Deepa Driver and Jeremy Corbyn is aimed at encouraging the participation of
students at the rally.
"All these initiatives are meant to prod European citizens and their leaders into realizing that it is
increasingly they who are being put on trial by this historical case," say the organizers of the EU
Free Assange Rally. "How they react to this international call for action demanding justice for
Assange will tell what side of history our current leaders, and all of us, have chosen to be on.
Because, in the end, we are all Assange."
TO GET IN TOUCH: freeassangewave@gmail.com
+49 15217817206
To download a banner: https://somersetbean.com/free-assange/
Social media hashtag: #EUFreeAssangeRally
#BringYourChair ("we the people have something to say")