Tag: Assange

A British MP has accused a Foreign Office minister of “misleading parliament” over his department’s involvement in the secret operation to arrest Julian Assange. Kenny MacAskill MP, a former Scottish justice secretary, asked the Foreign Office “whether any people working on Operation Pelican were based within [its] Department’s premises.”  Pelican was the secret Metropolitan Police-led […]

Four of Britain’s most powerful government ministries are refusing to say if their officials have met with US authorities to discuss the case of Julian Assange.  The Home Office, Cabinet Office, Foreign Office, and Ministry of Justice all recently failed to tell parliament about any potential contact with their US counterparts on the issue of […]

The British government assigned at least 15 people to the secret operation to seize Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, new information shows.  The WikiLeaks founder was given political asylum by Ecuador in 2012, but was never allowed safe passage out of Britain to avoid persecution by the US government.  The Australian journalist […]

“Julian is fighting for his survival and he’s going through hell, that’s the best way to put it,” Stella Assange says when I ask how he’s doing. The wife of the world’s most famous political prisoner is speaking to Declassified as part of her relentless battle to save her husband’s life. “Sometimes it’s been really, […]

When the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was dragged out of Ecuador’s London embassy in handcuffs three years ago, he was clutching a book given to him by the Italian investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi. Gore Vidal’s History of the National Security State argues that America’s ‘military-industrial-security complex’ exploits fear of the enemy in order to generate […]

On a cloudy Saturday morning in the middle of June 2012, Australian journalist Julian Assange walked into the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge, London.  He was a hunted man. Over the past two years, he’d been revealing the secrets, in alliance with the world’s largest newspapers, of the US’s so-called War on Terror, an extraordinary explosion […]

The abject submission of British authorities to the Master in Washington in the case of journalist Julian Assange is painful to observe but – unfortunately – not difficult to understand. The roots go back to the Second World War, when Britain handed the mantle of world domination over to its former colony. The US had […]

“I had my first speech outside Number 10 as prime minister all planned out,” Jeremy Corbyn tells me. “I was going to announce homelessness in Britain ends now, next week no-one will be sleeping rough.”  He is sitting on a sofa at the offices of his Peace & Justice Project in Finsbury Park, deep in […]

Priti Patel sat on the Henry Jackson Society’s (HJS) advisory council from around 2013-16, although the exact dates are unclear as neither the HJS nor Patel responded to Declassified’s requests for clarification.  She has also received funds from the HJS, and was paid £2,500 by the group to visit Washington in March 2013 to attend […]

The UK’s treatment of Julian Assange posed a public relations problem for the Foreign Office’s media freedom campaign, files seen by Declassified UK show. In July 2019, the UK co-hosted a Global Conference for Media Freedom, a first-of-its-kind event where 50 countries gathered to form a Media Freedom Coalition. Costing £2.4 million, the event was […]

Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett, the judge that will soon decide Julian Assange’s fate, is a close personal friend of Sir Alan Duncan, who as foreign minister arranged Assange’s eviction from the Ecuadorian embassy.  The two have known each other since their student days at Oxford in the 1970s, when Duncan called Burnett “the Judge”. […]

New figures show Britain’s public prosecutor, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), splashed £151,000 on barristers who failed to convince a judge in January that the US has the right to extradite the WikiLeaks publisher. The CPS acts on behalf of the US Department of Justice in transatlantic extradition cases. Another £22,000 of British public money […]

UK government’s little-known proposed reforms to Britain’s Official Secrets Acts pose far-reaching threats to the media and the public’s right to know. They could land journalists and others in jail for 14 years for publishing information the government claims damages national security.

The UK government paid £8,330 in November 2018 to bring Ecuador’s defence minister Oswaldo Jarrín to Britain, two months before the planned seizure of Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, it can be revealed. It is unusual for foreign ministers to have their trips to the UK paid by the British government, and […]

As US prosecutors lodge an appeal in their resolve to jail Julian Assange for espionage, a former British Cabinet minister has delivered a stinging attack on Britain’s extradition treaty with the US.

There is a real danger that the British judge’s ruling in the Julian Assange extradition case will encourage other governments to charge and seek to extradite journalists in the UK and elsewhere for exposing their military operations and human rights abuses.

One of the US prosecution’s key medical witnesses in the Julian Assange hearing, who claimed that Assange’s risk of suicide is ‘manageable’ if extradited to the US, works for an academic institute that is funded by the UK Ministry of Defence and linked to the US Department of Defence, it can be revealed.

The husband of the chief magistrate overseeing Julian Assange’s extradition case was closely associated with a lobby group publicly criticising the WikiLeaks founder around the time his wife was ruling against Assange, it can be revealed.

The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice is blocking the release of basic information about the judge who is to rule on Julian Assange’s extradition to the US in what appears to be an irregular application of the Freedom of Information Act, it can be revealed.

Julian Assange is one of just two inmates at Belmarsh maximum security prison in London, which houses 797 prisoners, being held for violating bail conditions, it can be revealed.

Sajid Javid, who was Britain’s Home Secretary from April 2018 to July 2019, attended “starlight chats” and “after-dinner cocktails” in a series of off-the-record conferences involving high-level US military and intelligence figures at a 5-star island resort off the coast of Georgia, USA. Many of those attending have been exposed in WikiLeaks publications and have […]

It can further be revealed that Lady Emma Arbuthnot was appointed Chief Magistrate in Westminster on the advice of a Conservative government minister with whom she had attended a secretive meeting organised by one of these Foreign Office partner organisations two years before.  Liz Truss, then Justice Secretary, “advised” the Queen to appoint Lady Arbuthnot […]

British foreign secretary Dominic Raab recently described the “rule of international law” as one of the “guiding lights” of UK foreign policy. By contrast, the government regularly chides states it opposes, such as Russia or Iran, as violators of international law. These governments are often consequently termed “rogue states” in the mainstream media, the supposed […]

The son of Lady Emma Arbuthnot, the Westminster chief magistrate overseeing the extradition proceedings of Julian Assange, is the vice-president and cyber-security adviser of a firm heavily invested in a company founded by GCHQ and MI5 which seeks to stop data leaks, it can be revealed. Alexander Arbuthnot’s employer, the private equity firm Vitruvian Partners, […]