was said by his lawyers to be too ill to appear by video link<\/a><\/strong><\/span> for the latest court hearing of the case on Thursday.<\/span><\/p>\nAssange has been moved to the health ward of Belmarsh prison, London, where he has been serving a 50-week sentence for skipping bail while fighting extradition to the US. He is accused of violating the Espionage Act by publishing secret documents containing the names of confidential US military and diplomatic sources.<\/span><\/p>\nAfter meeting Assange earlier this month in the company of medical experts who examined him, Melzer will say on Friday that he fears the Australian\u2019s human rights could be seriously violated if he is extradited to the US and will condemn what he describes as the \u201cdeliberate and concerted abuse inflicted for years\u201d on him.<\/span><\/p>\nAssange was arrested in April after Ecuador revoked his political asylum and invited police inside the country\u2019s Knightsbridge diplomatic premises, where he had sought refuge in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over allegations of sexual assault, which he has denied.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cPhysically there were ailments but that side of things are being addressed by the prison health service and there was nothing urgent or dangerous in that way,\u201d Melzer said.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cWhat was worrying was the psychological side and his constant anxiety. It was perceptible that he had a sense of being under threat from everyone. He understood what my function was but it\u2019s more that he was extremely agitated and busy with his own thoughts. It was difficult to have a very structured conversation with him.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nMelzer said that Belmarsh was an old prison and had issues about that but he described it as well maintained, adding that characterisations of it as a \u201csupermax\u201d or \u201cthe Guantanamo of Britain\u201d were unhelpful. While it does have a high-security wing Melzer said that Assange was not in that section.<\/span><\/p>\nThe lawyer, who receives 10 to 15 requests each day from sources asking for him to get involved, said that his office had been approached by Assange\u2019s lawyers in December. But he said that he was initially reluctant to do so, admitting he was affected by what he called the \u201cprejudice\u201d around the case.<\/span><\/p>\nHowever, he began looking into the case again in March and, earlier this week, wrote letters to the foreign ministers of the US, the UK and Sweden.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cIn the course of the past nine years, Mr Assange has been exposed to persistent, progressively severe abuse ranging from systematic judicial persecution and arbitrary confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy, to his oppressive isolation, harassment and surveillance inside the embassy, and from deliberate collective ridicule, insults and humiliation, to open instigation of violence and even repeated calls for his assassination,\u201d Melzer will say on Friday.<\/span><\/p>\nHe added the UK authorities had contacted his Geneva office to indicate that the British government would be issuing a point-by-point rebuttal of the assertions made in his letter.<\/span><\/p>\nMelzer, who is urging the UK government not to extradite Assange to the US or to any other state failing to provide reliable guarantees against his onward transfer to the US, criticised the way in which Assange\u2019s case was handled after police took him from the embassy.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cI was surprised, for example, to see that on the date he was arrested he was immediately brought to court after six years in the embassy and then convicted. Under the normal rule of law you would expect someone to be arrested and then given a couple of weeks to prepare his defence at least.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nThe former legal adviser to the Red Cross will say on Friday: \u201cIn 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic states ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nAssange could face decades in a US prison after being charged with violating the Espionage Act by publishing classified information through WikiLeaks.<\/span><\/p>\nProsecutors earlier this month announced 17 additional charges against him for publishing hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables and files on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/span><\/p>\nThe 47-year-old was previously charged with working to hack a Pentagon computer system, in a secret indictment that was unveiled soon after his arrest at Ecuador\u2019s embassy in London.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cHe\u2019s in fact far from well,\u201d Assange\u2019s lawyer, Gareth Peirce told the hearing on Thursday at the Westminster magistrates court. The next hearing on the extradition request was set for 12 June.<\/span><\/p>\nA UK government spokesperson said: \u201cThe UK has a close working relationship with UN bodies and is committed to upholding the rule of law. We support the important work of the special rapporteur\u2019s mandate and will respond to his letter in due course, but we disagree with a number of his observations.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cJudges are impartial and independent from government, with any judgment based solely on the facts of the case and the applicable law. The law provides all those convicted with a right of appeal.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nSource<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"And you thought that sort of thing only happened in totalitarian states like North Korea or Iran: not in the \u201cfree\u201d and \u201cdemocratic\u201d West? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[42,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-controlling-the-news-andor-the-free-exchange-of-ideas-and-information","category-Current_Affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=189204"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":189211,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189204\/revisions\/189211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=189204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=189204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=189204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/a><\/p>\n