“Yesterday, Jennifer Robinson, a lawyer for Assange, was permitted to make a brief statement to the current UN Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva. She urged the UN to send a special rapporteur to visit Assange to see the “severe impact” on his physical and mental health of his confinement inside the embassy for the past six years, denied sunlight or outdoor access.

Robinson told the meeting the British authorities had made it clear that if Assange leaves the embassy to seek medical treatment he will be arrested. “He cannot leave the embassy because the UK will not provide assurances against extradition to the US,” she said.
“The UK is showing deliberate disregard for his medical needs by asking him to choose between his human right to asylum and his human right to medical treatment. No-one should have to make that choice.”
Robinson reminded the council that in 2016 the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled that Assange was being arbitrarily detained. The UN agency called on the Swedish and British authorities to end his “deprivation of liberty, respect his physical integrity and freedom of movement, and afford him the right to compensation.” wsws.org

bless her heart. assange's allies are staunch as all giddy-up. his parents make me cry when they say how much they admire and support him; they must have taught him well, eh?

so many years since he's seen his wife or chirren, yes, small wonder that he's psycho-spiritually strained.

i think i must have seen in on john pilger's twitter account: ‘Bringing Julian Assange Home, John Pilger, June 18, newmatilda.com

“I know Julian Assange well; I regard him as a close friend, a person of extraordinary resilience and courage. I have watched a tsunami of lies and smear engulf him, endlessly, vindictively, perfidiously; and I know why they smear him.

In 2008, a plan to destroy both WikiLeaks and Assange was laid out in a top secret document dated 8 March, 2008. The authors were the Cyber Counter-intelligence Assessments Branch of the US Defence Department. They described in detail how important it was to destroy the “feeling of trust” that is WikiLeaks’ “centre of gravity”.

This would be achieved, they wrote, with threats of “exposure [and]criminal prosecution” and an unrelenting assault on reputation. The aim was to silence and criminalise WikiLeaks and its editor and publisher. It was as if they planned a war on a single human being and on the very principle of freedom of speech.
Their main weapon would be personal smear. Their shock troops would be enlisted in the media – those who are meant to keep the record straight and tell us the truth.
The irony is that no-one told these journalists what to do. I call them Vichy journalists – after the Vichy government that served and enabled the German occupation of wartime France.” [snip]

“No investigative journalism in my lifetime can equal the importance of what WikiLeaks has done in calling rapacious power to account. It is as if a one-way moral screen has been pushed back to expose the imperialism of liberal democracies: the commitment to endless warfare and the division and degradation of “unworthy” lives: from Grenfell Tower to Gaza.
When Harold Pinter accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, he referred to “a vast tapestry of lies up on which we feed”. He asked why “the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought” of the Soviet Union were well known in the West while America’s imperial crimes “never happened… even while [they]were happening, they never happened”.

In its revelations of fraudulent wars (Afghanistan, Iraq) and the bald-faced lies of governments (the Chagos Islands), WikiLeaks has allowed us to glimpse how the imperial game is played in the 21st century. That is why Assange is in mortal danger."

BREAKING: Human Rights Watch: Ecuador denied us access to check on @JulianAssange https://t.co/pPf0GTjTlp

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 20, 2018

lord luv a duck.