Committee to Defend Julian Assange

Join us to mark a year since Julian #Assange became a free man with a get together of solidarity activists on Sunday 29/06/25 between 6:30-8:30pm at Marchmont Community Centre 62 Marchmont St London WC1N 1AB Nearest tube station Russel Square on the Piccadilly Line #FreePress

This Saturday 11th of April 2026 at 2pm join us under the balcony of the Ecuadorean Embassy at no 3 Hans Crescent! let’s mark the Anniversary of Julian #Assange’s violent expulsion, US indictment and incarceration within the cruel walls of Belmarsh prison.

Israeli Defence minister Israel Katz has referred to the project as the “hate flotilla,” announcing “To the antisemitic Greta [Thunberg] and her friends who echo Hamas propaganda, I say clearly: You’d better turn back – because you will not reach Gaza. Israel will act against any attempt to break the blockade or to assist terrorist organisations – by sea, by air, and by land.” In May 2025, a previous attempt to reach Gaza with an aid shipment was hit by drones in international waters off Malta, forcing an end to the voyage. In 2010, Israeli forces boarded vessels of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla as it attempted to break the naval blockade of Gaza, killing nine people. Video: boarding of the Madleen. The ship's location is being tracked by Forensic Architecture: freedomflotilla.org/ffc-tracker/

Gaza freedom flotilla ship Madleen, due to enter Palestinian waters at around 2am local time Monday, has been intercepted by Israeli vessels and quadcopter drones in international waters. The ship has been sprayed with an unknown substance; crew are reporting the ship is being boarded.

Sunday 29th of June 2025 6:30pm-8:30pm, Julian Assange - One year free - A reflection - Join us! wiseupaction.info/2025/06/08/sun… via @greekemmy

Julian Assange is free for a year Join us to mark the event - mailchi.mp/67df269cd7a1/j…

Julian Assange's t-shirt at Cannes lists the names of 4,986 Palestinian children aged five and under, killed by Israeli forces since 2023. [Photos by David Fisher]

The Six Billion Dollar Man, an award-winning documentary and recent Golden Globe winner, premieres at the Cannes Film Festival. It traces WikiLeaks’ groundbreaking publications, the persecution that followed, and the campaign that secured Julian Assange’s release from Belmarsh prison. The film is an unflinching account of war crimes, surveillance, state power, and the human cost of exposing the truth. Julian Assange appears at Cannes alongside Stella, Kristinn Hrafnsson, Joseph Farrell, Eugene Jarecki, Rafael Correa, Jen Robinson, and the team behind the film. Stella Assange wore a brooch depicting British designer Vivienne Westwood holding a sign reading Stop Killing, which signifies one of the film’s most urgent messages — a call for justice, accountability, and an end to the violence exposed in WikiLeaks’ revelations. [Photos - Reuters]

Julian Assange wore a Stop Israel T-shirt. Stella Assange wore a large message saying "Stop Killing". Two messages. One demand: end the violence.

Microsoft is facing internal backlash over its provision of cloud services and AI tools to the Israeli military. The company is now reportedly blocking employee emails containing terms like “Palestine,” “Gaza,” and “genocide.” The block was revealed by No Azure for Apartheid, a group of pro-Palestinian Microsoft workers, who say the company quietly activated the filter on its Exchange servers shortly after a protest at Microsoft Build 2025.

Source: L’Œil d’or 2025 Jury’s Special Prize to Eugene Jarecki loeildor.scam.fr/actualites-res…

The Six Billion Dollar Man has won the Jury’s Special Prize on the 10th anniversary of the L’Œil d’or. In awarding the prize, the jury stated: “In these uncertain times, when political and corporate powers threaten public and individual freedoms, the jury pays tribute to Eugene Jarecki’s film and Julian Assange’s fight. A rigorous demonstration, an unrelenting analysis that shows that whatever the circumstances, resistance is the only possible path.”

“It makes aid conditional on political and military aims. It makes starvation a bargaining chip.” TRIAL International has filed legal complaints in Switzerland, urging an investigation into the Swiss-incorporated Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Despite having no disclosed funding sources or any documented expertise in aid delivery, the GHF has been backed by the US to begin distributing aid into hubs in Gaza controlled by the Israeli military. TRIAL warns that the GHF risks undermining genuine humanitarian relief and violating international law. GHF has been condemned by leading aid and human rights groups as a politicised sham, dependent on Israeli control. “The GHF board includes former senior U.S. military and security officials with no roots in Gaza, no accountability to Palestinian civil society, and a clear record of working in coordination with the Israeli and U.S. Governments,” according to a statement signed by 11 international aid and human rights organisations. “Aid does not need rebranding. It needs to be allowed in.” Earlier in May, Israel's cabinet signed off on a plan to impose biometric data collection as a condition of aid distribution: "Palestinians would be coming to these places, registered and screened through facial recognition technology," according to journalist Daniel Estrin. UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher said: “It makes aid conditional on political and military aims. It makes starvation a bargaining chip. It is cynical sideshow. A deliberate distraction. A fig leaf for further violence and displacement.”

Source: חשיפה: העמותה השוויצרית לחלוקת מזון בעזה נסגרת shomrim.news/hebrew/ghf-swi…

Exposure: Swiss Association for Food Distribution in Gaza Shuts Down The chaos surrounding the humanitarian aid mechanism for Gaza continues. Following allegations of lack of transparency, key figures distancing themselves, and calls for a criminal investigation in Switzerland, Shomrim reveals that the Swiss-based Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) is ceasing operations before it even begins distributing food. The aid mechanism will now operate solely through an American entity. A GHF spokesperson confirmed the details to Shomrim. The Swiss association, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), is shutting down its operations before starting food distribution in Gaza. Humanitarian aid distribution in Gaza will now be conducted through an American entity. A GHF spokesperson confirmed these details in a conversation with Shomrim. GHF, which was meant to oversee food distribution in Gaza, made headlines earlier this month in a series of international reports about the Gaza aid program. Even then, the association’s food distribution plan faced criticism from the UN and other organizations involved in the field, primarily due to the secrecy surrounding its establishment, funding sources, and distribution plan, which critics argued would not address the food shortage. In the past 24 hours, investigations by The New York Times and The Washington Post hinted that the Gaza food distribution program is essentially an Israeli initiative conducted through foreign-registered associations in an attempt to conceal it. This morning, Shomrim and Ynet revealed that the Swiss association is undergoing an internal crisis. According to documents published for the first time, about two weeks ago, one of the three registered board members, the only Swiss national, attorney David Kohler, resigned. Kohler comes from an atypical background for humanitarian aid: he works at a small boutique firm called Alpina Fiduciaries, specializing in wealth planning for the ultra-wealthy. Another concern raised by documents obtained by Shomrim is that the registered founder of the association is Nathan (Nate) Mook, former CEO of the international humanitarian aid organization World Central Kitchen. However, in an interview with the Financial Times last week, Mook distanced himself from the organization, claiming he is not part of its board. Neither Kohler nor Mook responded to Shomrim’s requests for comment. This morning, it was also reported that a complaint was filed in Switzerland against GHF, alleging it is not neutral and may contribute to the forced displacement of Gazans from their homes. Switzerland, it was reported, is considering opening a criminal investigation against the association, while GHF clarified that they “adhere to humanitarian principles and will not support the forced displacement of civilians.” It has now been revealed that the individuals behind the Swiss GHF, who previously established an identically named association in Delaware, decided in recent days to permanently close both entities. According to a GHF spokesperson, they will continue operations through a third entity registered in the United States in February this year, also under the name Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. This third American entity, a GHF source says, employs the staff, receives donations for the association, and is responsible for procuring food for Gazans. The GHF spokesperson confirmed the details, stating to Shomrim: “The only active GHF entity today is one established in the United States in February 2025 by Loic Henderson (an American attorney; A.B.). This is the only legal entity through which GHF operates and will continue to operate henceforth.” The spokesperson also addressed the question regarding Nate Mook, saying: “The document mentioning his name was a draft that, unfortunately, was leaked to the press. GHF never publicly stated that Mook is a board member. He advised us informally during our establishment.”

Sources: Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans web.archive.org/web/2025060100… How Palantir Will Build A Zionist Surveillance State the307.substack.com/p/how-palantir… The Gleeful Profiteers of Trump’s Police State motherjones.com/politics/2025/… Executive Order: Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos whitehouse.gov/presidential-a… Palantir Knows Everything About You bloomberg.com/features/2018-…

Release the files.

Sources: 'Trump Flipped On Us': MAGA Reacts to Potential National Citizen Database newsweek.com/donald-trump-p… Trump Taps Palantir to Create Master Database on Every American yahoo.com/news/trump-tap…

Sources: The WikiLeaks Threat [PDF] wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/WikiLe… Palantir: the Paypal offshoot becomes a weapon in the war against whistleblowers and WikiLeaks mintpressnews.com/palantir-the-p…

In 2011, Palantir and HBGary Federal were exposed for drafting an attack plan targeting WikiLeaks, on behalf of Bank of America.

Julian Assange's full testimony to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg today: "Mr. Chairman, esteemed members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, ladies and gentlemen. The transition from years of confinement in a maximum-security prison to standing here before the representatives of 46 nations and 700 million people is a profound and surreal shift. The experience of isolation for years in a small cell is difficult to convey; it strips away one's sense of self, leaving only the raw essence of existence. I am not yet fully equipped to speak about what I have endured - the relentless struggle to stay alive, both physically and mentally, nor can i speak yet about the deaths by hanging, murder, and medical neglect of my fellow prisoners. I apologise in advance if my words falter or if my presentation lacks the polish you might expect in such a distinguished forum. Isolation has taken its toll, which I am trying to unwind, and expressing myself in this setting is a challenge. However, the gravity of this occasion and the weight of the issues at hand compel me to set aside my reservations and speak to you directly. I have traveled a long way, literally and figuratively, to be before you today. Before our discussion or answering any questions you might have, I wish to thank PACE for its 2020 resolution (2317), [pace.coe.int/en/files/28508…], which stated that my imprisonment set a dangerous precedent for journalists and noted that the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture called for my release. I'm also grateful for PACE's 2021 statement [pace.coe.int/en/news/8446/p…] expressing concern over credible reports that US officials discussed my assassination, again calling for my prompt release. And I commend the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee for commissioning a renowned rapporteur, Sunna Ævarsdóttir, to investigate the circumstances surrounding my detention and conviction and the consequent implications for human rights. However, like so many of the efforts made in my case - whether they were from parliamentarians, presidents, prime ministers, the Pope, UN officials and diplomats, unions, legal and medical professionals, academics, activists, or citizens - none of them should have been necessary. None of the statements, resolutions, reports, films, articles, events, fundraisers, protests, and letters over the last 14 years should have been necessary. But all of them were necessary because without them I never would have seen the light of day. This unprecedented global effort was needed because of the legal protections that did exist, many existed only on paper or were not effective in any remotely reasonable time frame. I eventually chose freedom over unrealisable justice, after being detained for years and facing a 175 year sentence with no effective remedy. Justice for me is now precluded, as the US government insisted in writing into its plea agreement that I cannot file a case at the European Court of Human Rights or even a freedom of information act request over what it did to me as a result of its extradition request. I want to be totally clear. I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today because after years of incarceration because I plead guilty to journalism. I plead guilty to seeking information from a source. I plead guilty to obtaining information from a source. And I plead guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else. I hope my testimony today can serve to highlight the weaknesses of the existing safeguards and to help those whose cases are less visible but who are equally vulnerable. As I emerge from the dungeon of Belmarsh, the truth now seems less discernible, and I regret how much ground has been lost during that time period when expressing the truth has been undermined, attacked, weakened, and diminished. I see more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth and more self censorship. It is hard not to draw a line from the US government's prosecution of me - its crossing the rubicon by internationally criminalising journalism - to the chilled climate for freedom of expression now. When I founded WikiLeaks, it was driven by a simple dream: to educate people about how the world works so that, through understanding, we might bring about something better. Having a map of where we are lets us understand where we might go. Knowledge empowers us to hold power to account and to demand justice where there is none. We obtained and published truths about tens of thousands of hidden casualties of war and other unseen horrors, about programs of assassination, rendition, torture, and mass surveillance. We revealed not just when and where these things happened but frequently the policies, the agreements, and structures behind them. When we published Collateral Murder, the infamous gun camera footage of a US Apache helicopter crew eagerly blowing to pieces Iraqi journalists and their rescuers, the visual reality of modern warfare shocked the world. But we also used interest in this video to direct people to the classified policies for when the US military could deploy lethal force in Iraq and how many civilians could be killed before gaining higher approval. In fact, 40 years of my potential 175-year sentence was for obtaining and releasing these policies. The practical political vision I was left with after being immersed in the world's dirty wars and secret operations is simple: Let us stop gagging, torturing, and killing each other for a change. Get these fundamentals right and other political, economic, and scientific processes will have space to take care of the rest. WikiLeaks' work was deeply rooted in the principles that this Assembly stands for. Journalism that elevated freedom of information and the public's right to know found its natural operational home in Europe. I lived in Paris and we had formal corporate registrations in France and in Iceland. Our journalistic and technical staff were spread throughout Europe. We published to the world from servers in based in France, Germany, and Norway. But 14 years ago the United States military arrested one of our alleged whistleblowers, PFC Manning, a US intelligence analyst based in Iraq. The US government concurrently launched an investigation against me and my colleagues. The US government illicitly sent planes of agents to Iceland, paid bribes to an informer to steal our legal and journalistic work product, and without formal process pressured banks and financial services to block our subscriptions and freeze our accounts. The UK government took part in some of this retribution. It admitted at the European Court of Human Rights that it had unlawfully spied on my UK lawyers during this time. Ultimately this harassment was legally groundless. President Obama's Justice Department chose not to indict me, recognizing that no crime had been committed. The United States had never before prosecuted a publisher for publishing or obtaining government information. To do so would require a radical and ominous reinterpretation of the US Constitution. In January 2017, Obama also commuted the sentence of Manning, who had been convicted of being one of my sources. However, in February 2017, the landscape changed dramatically. President Trump had been elected. He appointed two wolves in MAGA hats: Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman and former arms industry executive, as CIA Director, and William Barr, a former CIA officer, as US Attorney General. By March 2017, WikiLeaks had exposed the CIA's infiltration of French political parties, its spying on French and German leaders, its spying on the European Central Bank, European economics ministries, and its standing orders to spy on French industry as a whole. We revealed the CIA's vast production of malware and viruses, its subversion of supply chains, its subversion of antivirus software, cars, smart TVs and iPhones. CIA Director Pompeo launched a campaign of retribution. It is now a matter of public record that under Pompeo's explicit direction, the CIA drew up plans to kidnap and to assassinate me within the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and authorized going after my European colleagues, subjecting us to theft, hacking attacks, and the planting of false information. My wife and my infant son were also targeted. A CIA asset was permanently assigned to track my wife and instructions were given to obtain DNA from my six month old son's nappy. This is the testimony of more than 30 current and former US intelligence officials speaking to the US press, which has been additionally corroborated by records seized in a prosecution brought against some of the CIA agents involved. The CIA's targeting of myself, my family and my associates through aggressive extrajudicial and extraterritorial means provides a rare insight into how powerful intelligence organisations engage in transnational repression. Such repressions are not unique. What is unique is that we know so much about this one due to numerous whistleblowers and to judicial investigations in Spain. This Assembly is no stranger to extraterritorial abuses by the CIA. PACE's groundbreaking report on CIA renditions in Europe exposed how the CIA operated secret detention centres and conducted unlawful renditions on European soil, violating human rights and international law. In February this year, the alleged source of some of our CIA revelations, former CIA officer Joshua Schulte, was sentenced to forty years in prison under conditions of extreme isolation. His windows are blacked out, and a white noise machine plays 24 hours a day over his door so that he cannot even shout through it. These conditions are more severe than those found in Guantanamo Bay. Transnational repression is also conducted by abusing legal processes. The lack of effective safeguards against this means that Europe is vulnerable to having its mutual legal assistance and extradition treaties hijacked by foreign powers to go after dissenting voices in Europe. In Mike Pompeo's memoirs, which I read in my prison cell, the former CIA Director bragged about how he pressured the US Attorney General to bring an extradition case against me in response to our publications about the CIA. Indeed, acceding to Pompeo's efforts, the US Attorney General reopened the investigation against me that Obama had closed and re-arrested Manning, this time as a witness. Manning was held in prison for over a year and fined a thousand dollars a day in a formal attempt to coerce her into providing secret testimony against me. She ended up attempting to take her own life. We usually think of attempts to force journalists to testify against their sources. But Manning was now a source being forced to testify against their journalist. By December 2017, CIA Director Pompeo had got his way, and the US government issued a warrant to the UK for my extradition. The UK government kept the warrant secret from the public for two more years, while it, the US government, and the new president of Ecuador moved to shape the political, legal, and diplomatic ground for my arrest. When powerful nations feel entitled to target individuals beyond their borders, those individuals do not stand a chance unless there are strong safeguards in place and a state willing to enforce them. Without them no individual has a hope of defending themselves against the vast resources that a state aggressor can deploy. If the situation were not already bad enough in my case, the US government asserted a dangerous new global legal position. Only US citizens have free speech rights. Europeans and other nationalities do not have free speech rights. But the US claims its Espionage Act still applies to them regardless of where they are. So Europeans in Europe must obey US secrecy law with no defences at all as far as the US government is concerned. An American in Paris can talk about what the US government is up to - perhaps. But for a Frenchman in Paris, to do so is a crime without any defence and he may be extradited just like me. Now that one foreign government has formally asserted that Europeans have no free speech rights, a dangerous precedent has been set. Other powerful states will inevitably follow suit. The war in Ukraine has already seen the criminalisation of journalists in Russia, but based on the precedent set in my extradition, there is nothing to stop Russia, or indeed any other state, from targeting European journalists, publishers, or even social media users, by claiming that their secrecy laws have been violated. The rights of journalists and publishers within the European space are seriously threatened. Transnational repression cannot become the norm here. As one of the world's two great norm-setting institutions, PACE must act. The criminalisation of newsgathering activities is a threat to investigative journalism everywhere. I was formally convicted, by a foreign power, for asking for, receiving, and publishing truthful information about that power while I was in Europe. The fundamental issue is simple: Journalists should not be prosecuted for doing their jobs. Journalism is not a crime; it is a pillar of a free and informed society. Mr Chairman, distinguished delegates, if Europe is to have a future where the freedom to speak and the freedom to publish the truth are not privileges enjoyed by a few but rights guaranteed to all then it must act so that what has happened in my case never happens to anyone else. I wish to express my deepest gratitude to this assembly, to the conservatives, social democrats, liberals, leftists, greens, and independents - who have supported me throughout this ordeal and to the countless individuals who have advocated tirelessly for my release. It is heartening to know that in a world often divided by ideology and interests, there remains a shared commitment to the protection of essential human liberties. Freedom of expression and all that flows from it is at a dark crossroad. I fear that unless norm setting institutions like PACE wake up to the gravity of the situation it will be too late. Let us all commit to doing our part to ensure that the light of freedom never dims, that the pursuit of truth will live on, and that the voices of the many are not silenced by the interests of the few." Watch the entire hearing here (includes introductions and following Q&A session) 👉 youtube.com/live/Mq85IZMei…