Hammond egg on his face

Follow @JohnPlatinumG The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention after due consideration reached the conclusion that Julian Assange was being 'arbitrarily detained', that he should be released, compensated and given back his passport. Our Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, did not agree with the decision - though when earlier given an opportunity to appeal against the courts findings declined. Instead he waited for their conclusion  and lambasted the international lawyers who had made the advice. This is most improper and childish of someone without a legal background yet so high-ranking in the UK government.

"I reject the decision of this working group. It is a group made up of lay people and not lawyers. Julian Assange is a fugitive from justice. He is hiding from justice in the Ecuadorian embassy.

He can come out any time he chooses.. . . But he will have to face justice in Sweden if he chooses to do so. This is frankly a ridiculous finding by the working group and we reject it."

First let us see if he is right. Are they lay people? I think not. Click on this link which gives the credentials of the five international lawyers. These are biographies of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights. The only person commenting adversely on these experts' credentials and opinions is someone least qualified to do so: Philip Hammond.

Can the UK reject the findings of the Working Group? Yes. One of the problems with international law is that findings can be rejected by a nation state. The UN Working Group is a higher authority than a nation state and the UK has a lot to lose by not applying the advice. You expect countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia not to abide by international law but traditionally, before the turn of the century, not countries like the UK.

All that changed with Tony Blair's illegal war on Iraq and since then human rights in the UK have gone decidedly downhill. There are all kinds of Acts to hold people in prison without trial, to hold courts in secret so that evidence cannot be tested, to prevent coroners from conducting inquests by replacing the inquest with an Inquiry, as in the recent Robert Owen Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko. Human rights, going right back to the Magna Carta (1215), are being dumped in the twenty first century. This, I believe, is part of a last-ditch attempt by failing empires to enslave the planet.

I am working on a draft to petition parliament, the European Court of Human Rights, Philip Hammond himself, and Jeremy Corbyn to compel Hammond to obey international law. The UK is a permanent member of the Security Council of the United Nations and Hammond is trying to make a mockery of that body. The reason the League of Nations (predecessor to the United Nations) failed was because certain countries did not abide by League of Nations' findings.

The powerlessness of the League of Nations was demonstrated most conspicuously in the Lytton Inquiry which investigated the false-flag Mukden Incident (1931), in which the Japanese blew up a railway siding, blamed it on the Chinese, and used it as an excuse to invade Manchuria. Despite Japan being culpable according to the League of Nations, Japan ignored the findings and withdrew from the League of Nations in spring 1933. Three years later Haile Selassie petitioned the League of Nations to intervene to stop Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia (Abyssinia). Again it proved to be powerless to help. Finally Hitler's planned invasion of the Sudetenland, in what may have been a genuine attempt to avoid war by the UK and France a quadrilateral agreement between Italy, Germany, UK and France, allowed Germany to march into Czechoslovakia. The League of Nations stayed silent. Some may be old enough to recall that Japan, Germany and Italy were enemies of the allied forces in World War II.

With the case of Julian Assange the UK and Swedish governments are proposing to disobey international law in order to perpetrate the same kind of nation-state criminality the League of Nations was unable to prevent. Even if Julian Assange took advantage of a woman he had earlier that night had consensual sex with, he has been incarcerated for five years, in prison, house arrest and where he is now at the Ecuadorian Embassy. For a first offence it would be more than a severe punishment. Thinking people know that this is an attempt to get him extradited to the United States because of his revelations through Wikileaks of war crimes by that country. We really need to oppose these breaches before we end up being called fascists ourselves.

The hypocrisy of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs

Follow @JohnPlatinumG Support for Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, has been consistent over time. But where you would expect the most enthusiastic campaign, from his native country, Australia, the government has been least inclined to offer assistance. Dilatory is a word that comes to mind. Myself and two colleagues in Sweden, Okoth Osewe and Rafik Saley have co-written letters to Bob Carr, when he was Minister of Foreign Affairs, and to the most recent foreign minister, Julie Bishop, about the plight of Mr. Assange, and to inform the government that the ambassador from Sweden to Australia, Sven Olof Petersson, has knowingly been involved in handing individuals to the CIA to be rendered and tortured abroad.

We did not expect much from Bob Carr because of his known ties to America and all things American but Julie Bishop, at least while in opposition and while seeking to resonate with public Australian sentiment, suggested she was ashamed of Australia's neglected treatment of Assange by Carr.

Julie Bishop says as Foreign Minister she would re-examine the government’s conduct towards WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who remains unable to meaningfully exercise his right to asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Bob Carr's memoirs published this year show that Mr. Assange was right in criticizing the lack of meaningful assistance by the Gillard government. Like the previous government, the current Australian administration has not made any representations to Sweden and the United States in order to uphold Mr. Assange's rights. Carr in fact admitted to misleading the public with his false statement that Assange had received more assistance than any other Australian abroad.

It is a fact that the United States is seeking the prosecution of Mr. Assange, most recently confirmed by the Department of Justice in a submission to the court in the EPIC case (April 2014).

Julie Bishop said that, if elected to office, she would take advice on whether anything should change in the government’s position towards Julian Assange:

“We have differed with the government in a number of respects, particulary when Prime Minister Julia Gillard said that Julian Assange was guilty of an illegal act. I took issue with that at the time for he has not been  charged with any breach of laws in Australia and it was irresponsible for the prime minister to make such a prejudicial claim particularly given the circumstances he was in overseas. So, I would look at the matter carefully at the time, but in January 2013 it is hard to say what the situation will be at the time of the election, should we be privileged enough to be elected by the Australian people.”

In our letter to Julie Bishop we reminded her of her commitment in opposition and expected at long last a positive response. Instead we got a very similar reply to the one we received from Bob Carr's letter writer. Although the reply did not actually say so the interpretation was that the Australian foreign office does not mind if Sweden sends over ambassadors with a record for the approval of, and complicity in, torture and rendition. And rather than the challenging words she made as a potential Minister of Foreign Affairs, now she is in office the whole tenor is one of acceptance that Australia does not care about one of their most influential citizens.

Here is the response:

Film-maker extraordinaire

Follow @JohnPlatinumG Satire has been thrown to the wolves. They tore it to pieces and spat it out in cub-size chunks. Now nobody knows the difference between satire and reality. Today I finished the third of my short cartoons on how Julian Assange was framed. To me the three of them seem so real. There is a kind of sinister humour lurking in the truth of them.

The first is unreal in that the conversation probably took place by telephone rather than face to face. And if XtraNormal catered for a telephone conversation in the version I have that is probably the way I would have proceeded. Anna Ardin was the person who invited Julian Assange to stay at her flat when he went to Sweden. Several days after she claimed sexual  allegations took place, allegations which were illegally leaked to the Swedish press, she accused Julian Assange of rape. This was even though he stayed with her for days after the allegations. In fact the next day after she claimed these outrageous events took place she threw a crayfish party for Assange and friends. After going to the police station with Sofia, and before making a statement herself, she went home and deleted tweets about how she was enjoying the company. She also deleted a paper she wrote on how to get legal revenge on men who dump women. This seems to be based on advice she got at the police station, since she deleted them immediately after her first visit, then made her statement the next day. This is the content of the first cartoon.

The second cartoon covers Anna's friendship with the police interrogator Irmeli Krans and the problem Anna caused by bringing into the police station a torn condom she claimed Assange used when they had consensual sex. It was taken to the police laboratory but neither male nor female DNA could be found on it. That is the substance of the second cartoon.

The final episode (to date) is my idea of why Claes Borgstrom and Marianne Ny are pursuing a witch-hunt against Julian Assange, making a stab at the reason why they do not want to interview Assange in the UK. Marianne Ny has gone on record as saying that she would still pursue a prosecution even if she knew she was in the wrong. Claes Borgstrom is pursuing a case of rape against Assange even though he knows the Kashmir girl (Sofia) says she was not raped. He has virtually said that Sofia does not know whether she was raped or not. The third cartoon.

Finally, although this information has been available for two years it has been kept out of the UK media. The names of people like Irmeli Krans, Anna Ardin and Sofia W. have long been in the public domain but the UK media are banned from mentioning these people by name. But the news you get is not the real news, which is why so many people are turning to the Internet to find out what is going on, while politicians keep us in the dark to wage their disgusting wars that good journalists, and the Wikileaks founder and editor in chief, Julian Assange, tell the truth about.

Rough, tough, I've had enough justice

Follow @JohnPlatinumG The law-courts of the world should be dismantled and anarchy should rule!

There is an excellent argument for anarchy ruling since the legal institutions of the world are there simply to protect the interests of one section of society - the super-rich, neo-con, Zionist elite. Good people are in western prisons because of this injudicious system of law.

Bradley Manning, who allegedly leaked the footage of US military operatives opening fire on and killing  unarmed civilians, is in prison for allegedly revealing the truth to the world. Babar Ahmed, beaten up by British police, has been in prison for 8 years and now faces extradition to the most corrupt country on God's earth. Julian Assange, to whom the whole world should be thankful for his Wikileaks - the only source of accurate information - is now in danger of being extradited to Sweden on trumped-up charges. Sweden will sell him to their Yankee masters to try and plug the leak in Wikileaks and gag Assange himself.

We pay these overfed judges huge amounts of taxpayers money to make it as difficult as possible for honest people. Take the Assange case just heard in a British court. In the laugh-a-minute report from this case, Assange versus the Swedish Prosecution Authority, which finds in favour of the latter, there is the following paragraph:

“Everyone arrested or detained in accordance with the provisions of
paragraph 1(c) of this article shall be brought promptly before a
judge or other officer authorised by law to exercise judicial power
and shall be entitled to trial within a reasonable time…”


So how has this kind of justice been applied to Babar Ahmed in this country, and Bradley Manning in the US?