Liberté pour Julian Assange – Monika Karbowska

Julian Assange on trial from 24 to 27 February 2020

Monika Karbowska

Introduction: this article was finished just before the current events. Therefore, it does not contain any allusion, except unintentional, to the crisis we are experiencing. I decided to publish it because the repressive system is not suspended: those whose rights are violated need us more than ever. As it is forbidden to take pictures inside the court, I made the drawings to show the place.

For the Wikijustice association, since its creation, there is no « unimportant » hearing in contrast with an « important trial ». That’s why we didn’t focus on these days of the end of February announced with great pomp by the media as « the extradition trial of the century ». On the contrary, for the past six months we have been making every effort to be present at all the Westminter Magistrate Court hearings, which was not easy – getting reliable information in time, overcoming obstacles to attend the hearings at 181 Marylbone Avenue. Every brief encounter with Julian Assange, live or on video, was a proof of life for us and an opportunity to testify about his health and situation. After all this hard work since last August, I was relieved to know that he was alive, but I was also happy to know that I would be able to see him for 4 days, to give him our support and sympathy and maybe to communicate with him and transmit a message from him. All our efforts are aimed at his full and complete liberation, we would so much like him to know it and to be ready for this moment which we do not doubt is imminent.

So I was able to attend the trial for 4 days in the courtroom next to Belmarsh prison, in the London suburb of Thamesmead, and I was able to see Julian Assange for 5 to 6 hours each day.

But first I had to get into the premises. I could only take the subway and the bus from the London suburbs at 5:30 am and arrive on site at 6:45 am. Right away I noticed the camping of tents in the small park adjacent to the prison gate and yard. In France, the police would never have allowed activists to camp in front of the walls of a prison. England never ceases to amaze me with its lax system on certain points, tolerating passes, discrimination, violence and encouraging the violation of rules, procedures and rights in other circumstances. Precisely the « first come first served » rule for which we fought so hard at the Westminster court is about to be violated again: There are 14 people in the queue in front of the gate and Greekemmy has already created an illegal list on which she registers people after having duly torn off their names under the threat of not being able to get in despite waiting. Right in front of me are Christophe Deloire, secretary general of Reporters Without Borders, Christian Mihr, his counterpart from the German branch and Rebecca Vincent, head of the RSF office in Great Britain. I protest loudly against the appearance of the list. I know from experience that new people who arrived later will be added to the list and that I will not be able to enter because of this free ride. Greekemmy rushes towards me, raises his voice, threatens me with expulsion from the court. I take Christophe Deloire as a witness, in French. He seems to support Greekemmy’s list while I tell him that he would certainly not tolerate this kind of situation in France, that an ordinary person takes the names of people in the public space and decides who has the right to enter a court, so why does he accept this in the context of Julian Assange’s trial. He doesn’t answer me, but when other people who arrived later pass by us, an American woman living in France, who is standing behind us, also decides not to let herself be taken in. We stayed for an hour discussing the cultural aspects of our adventure while Edward Hamilton Fitzgerald, Gareth Peirce, and many journalists and cameramen arrived and entered the building after presenting a press card to the security guards. However, not all press cards are equal, as Wikijustice members who show theirs are turned away. Police officers, probably municipal ones, also arrive and greet Greekemmy and his relatives with a relaxed look. They just ask a young man behind us to remove his Anonymous mask and point out that there will only be 18 seats for the public.

The atmosphere becomes tense, however, when the security guards take us into the garden and park us in front of the building’s door between two rows of security barriers. There are already 30 of us in line as supposed journalists break through our group to get to the front. Journalists also enter easily through the right-hand line delimited by two other security barriers. There will be more than 100 journalists entering and leaving the court at any given time, 26 will have a seat directly in the courtroom. This is the moment that Greekemmy chooses to attack me again with insults while filming me with her cell phone while I protest against her behavior. I see especially that she gives herself for mission to divert the attention of the free ride of a very young girl who arrives from behind and brutally pushes my comrades to put herself in front of us. We protest but when I touch her arm to incite her to stop she starts to shout « don’t touch me » with a cynical arrogance which plunges us into stupor. She is seconded by her companion, the boy in the Anonymous mask, while Greekemmy continues to verbally assault me. The tone and violence rises in the line, the security guards do nothing to defuse the conflict but when I turn to the policemen who are watching us from 1 meter away, so that they bring some order, I am amazed to see that seeing people fighting to enter a court makes them laugh. They seem to be waiting for the strongest to win. Obviously the English system will never stop annoying me. I explain to my companions in misfortune that when one starts by finding normal the rights and violence in a queue in front of the court, one should not be surprised that one ends up getting used to the violations of rights and the defects of procedures by the same court of which Julian Assange is victim since several years.

The organization of the court could not be stranger either. The sign hanging over the entrance gate reads « HMCS », « Her Majesty Court Services ». On a metal sign in front of the building before the security gates it says « Woolwich Crown Court », but when I stand in front of the door on the left where the security guards are directing us, I see a simple A4 sheet of paper stuck on it with an arrow to the left and the words « Belmarsh Magistrate Court. On the right door, through which other users enter, a similar sheet of paper reads « Woolwich Crow court ».  While the trial of Julian Assange is taking place in the left wing, life goes on in the right wing of the building where the real Woolwich Crown Court works. Moreover, in the left wing of the building we will find almost all the staff we know from the Westminster Magistrate Court. So where are we really? The « Belmarsh Magistrate Court » seems to have only a very formal existence: the website of the British Ministry of Justice gives its address as 1 London Road in Bromley[1], a suburb of South London, while the Law pages gives it as 4 Belmarsh road in Thamesmead[2]. However on the map of Thamesmead 4 Belmarsh Road is not found, the number 2 being the address of the Woolwich Court, that is to say the building in front of which we are, whereas at 1 London Road in Bromley is in fact the Bromley Magistrate Cour[3]t.

We are exhausted when finally a young security guard, distraught and overwhelmed, unlocks the door and pushes us to prevent the crowd behind us from rushing in. He demands IDs from us and only lets 6 people in at a time. Indeed, when I came the two previous times for information, the Woolwich Crown Court had only one metal detector, obviously sufficient for the rather sparse activity of the institution. Today, another metal detector is installed for the users of the Woolwich Crown Court on the right side of the entrance, while tables are set up on the left side to manage the control of the visitors of Julian Assange’s trial in a rather artisanal way. On the tables are small plastic lockers in which to put the computer, coats and scarves, belts, shoes … it looks very « airport ». In all the overflow, the two young free riders from behind are obviously in front of us. I run as fast as I can to the floor, I get information from two security guards, because the Assange trial is not indicated anywhere, neither on the screen that displays the hearings of the day, nor on the information panel on the left of the hall.

I rush into a corridor, then into a space equipped with armchairs like a waiting room, then into a kind of narrow corridor, I arrive in another antechamber and there I see the door of the courtroom. I enter, and I could have stayed there because nobody asks me anything, but as I am not sure that I have the right to stay, I prefer to look for my comrades and to wait with the public not to lose the precious place. The place where someone told them to wait turns out to be this tiny hallway between two corridors, where we are soon squeezed together in front of a locked door and a small plastic sign marked « public gallery » with an arrow. The violent free-riding continues because there are 25 of us, the security guards have let in far more than the 18 places provided. Worse, when a very small agent tries to coax the crowd, he will have to shout loudly to announce that 6 places must be reserved for the family…

The tension is such that I only notice two days later that the « hose » where we are going to spend a lot of time waiting is in fact an airlock, that the 25 people stored inside prevent the release of the CHC (Common Horizontal Circulation) and their presence blocks the RIA (Armed Fire Faucet) locked in a shaft – this situation violates the fire safety standards commonly accepted, in Great Britain as in France. Worse, I soon noticed that the locked door we were waiting in front of was a… fire exit! An emergency exit leading to a fire escape should never be locked because in case of fire we will not be able to evacuate and we may simply die[4]. Just before 10 o’clock, the security guard unlocks the emergency exit and makes us enter a staircase which is obviously a fire escape. We have to go up this way to get to a landing where we pass a fire door, we find ourselves in an anteroom where there are women’s toilets on the right and men’s toilets on the left, and from where two corridors lead on the right to « courtroom 3 » and on the left to « courtroom 2 ». Ours is Courtroom 2, we have to enter another space where there are two doors that are probably the accesses to the gallery in normal time. Another security guard, a tall, severe redhead, opens a third door and shows us the seats to occupy. Behind a glass window, overlooking the courtroom by at least 10 meters, is the public gallery with 18 seats arranged in two rows. At the back is another locked door.

I don’t have time to think about the strange layout of the place on this first day of the trial: just as the agent opens the emergency exit, a portly Mediterranean man who was in the front of the line with Greekemmy stops me by taking my arm and tells me to leave my seat « to the Courage Foundation » which has just arrived. Stunned, I answer without hesitation « no » and when the man, in a threatening tone, says to me « how dare I refuse my place to the famous Courage Foundation », I answer that I also have the right to be there. Then I run up the stairs without asking for anything else and when I arrive in the gallery, I can only sit in a central place in the second row from where I can only see Julian Assange from a distance. However, the two members of the Courage Corp, a young man with red hair and a beard, perhaps Nathan Fuller, the manager of the New York company as can be verified on the NYS Department of State Division of Corporation website[5], and a 60 year old woman, took their seats just to the left of our group. The woman will take several pictures of Julian without the security guard worrying her. Similarly, the arrogant young woman who pushed everyone this morning took a seat next to her companion, but she slipped out of the room all morning and in the afternoon she took several pictures of Julian. The security guard finally kicked her out after the fourth photo.

Today I am still surprised that the man who wanted to kick me out of the court was Patrick Henningsen, a journalist from Russia Today International. The declared hostility of this journalist to my person surprises me all the more as I am seeing him for the first time and members of Wikijustice are working without problems with Russia Today, one of the journalists of RT France is going to interview me here later.

The best seats in the front row are occupied by the representatives of RSF sitting next to Kristinn Hrafnsson and Fidel Narvaez. After the break, the members of the German left-wing party die Linke Sevim Dagdelen and Heike Hänsel will arrive and two young people will give up their seats. Angela Richter, the German theater woman, will be seated in the 5th place in the front row from the left. On the right in the front row we are told that Julian Assange’s family is present: John Shipton, his son Gabriel Shipton, a tall, well-built older man, a 55-year-old woman with long, curly brown hair, and a young, dark-haired man with a pointed nose. I ask around – I hear it’s John Shipton’s brother, the brother’s wife and their son. At the far right Craig Murray is sitting with the family. What struck me was that throughout the hearing none of these people showed any emotion, except maybe a little Murray. Julian did not greet these people who call themselves « his family », he had no sign of collusion with them, no gesture, not even with Shipton. When Julian Assange turned his head toward this part of the gallery, it was as if he were seeing strangers. There were some rather unpleasant « I’m watching a show » aspects to their behavior. Some members of the family could not help but be on their phone despite the formal prohibition stated by the supervisor.

Below, I see the entire staff of the Westminster Court as we have known it since September. I see Rosie Sylvester, the manager, one of the clerks I’ve seen before. I see Prosecutor Lewis but the team of « Americans » and Clair Dobbin are by the gallery balcony as they sit at the far end of their bench on the right, in the front row. On the left side of this bench sit Edward Hamilton Fitzgerald and Mark Summers. Gareth Peirce is sitting behind them with his two assistants and Alistar Lyon. Finally, as a surprise because I did not know that a lawyer from another European bar could participate in a trial in Great Britain (what European directive makes this possible?), I note the presence of Baltazar Garzon in the back row, next to him Jimenez Martinez, Stella Morris and the young Mc McGrath. Jennifer Robinson is sitting with three men on a bench perpendicular to the lawyers, just in front of the rows where the 26 journalists who are lucky enough to have been admitted to the courtroom are seated. The long dock with its bay window is just behind Baltazar Garzon, who will be the only lawyer to greet Julian Assange twice, to shake his hand in the joint of the windows. Similarly, when Julian Assange tries to communicate with Gareth Peirce, he will first pass small handwritten papers to Baltazar Garzon for him to give to the lawyer. The former judge will appear nervous during the reading of the indictment and will leave the room several times. Baraitser will be seated behind a long table on a platform facing the room. Heavy files of documents will be scattered on the desks as the hearings progress, next to stabilizers and computers, documents will fall to the floor, but some lawyers will also spend time on their cell phones, which can be seen very well from above.

The emotion is palpable when Julian Assange enters through the back door of the box. He is flanked by two guards, a black man in a Mitie uniform (all the security guards present are employees of the Mitie company) and another, a stout white man in a white shirt and black pants. The latter glances suspiciously at the public in the gallery and will be the one to warn his colleague when one of my colleagues ventures to take a picture of Julian Assange. At first glance, he seems to be quite decent with his prisoner. Julian Assange is wearing a gray suit, with a gray sweater and a white shirt. His hair is cut short, he is clean-shaven and wears two pairs of glasses – one on his forehead and the other he will hold in his hand to use when sometimes he consults the huge file he is placing next to him on the bench. As he sits in the middle of the bench, I can see him from my seat. I can see that he has difficulty moving, even sitting still, because he has to hold on to the back of the bench. Also, when he puts his left leg on his right knee, it seems to me that it is to be able to balance the big file on his knees. Most of the time he remains with his hands clasped, fingers crossed, in an attitude of prostration and resignation. I see his sad face, especially when he looks up at the ceiling, the sky he cannot see, in the attitude of one who wants to escape from here at all costs… He blinks while tilting his head back, repeating this tic every 10 minutes or so. When his gaze sweeps the first row of the gallery, I think I detect in his eyes an expression of anger, disgust, a feeling of betrayal perhaps. Sometimes I see in his features something even more negative, a rictus of pain, perhaps hatred, and fear. Then he nervously rubs his fingers together, the same repetitive gestures that we have seen before and that the Wikijustice doctor has duly analyzed as symptoms of suffering due to torture.

The indictment justifying the extradition – the question of legal responsibility

From the outset Baraitser gave the floor to the prosecutor, and we will be watching the presentation of the indictment all morning. It is important to hear it at last, so many rumors have been circulating about it. Nevertheless, it is painful to hear such harsh assertions that seem monstrous to us. Indeed, the prosecutor immediately details the two charges: Julian Assange is accused of « computer misuse » and « conspiracy » with Chelsea Manning in order to steal classified documents, and then of disseminating these same documents with the names of the people involved, which led to the endangerment of these people, collaborators of the American army in Iraq and Afghanistan, who thus risked death or torture. Clearly, computer intrusion and theft in a meeting… it is very disturbing to hear this. Moreover, the prosecutor curiously relies on the « evidence » given by the media: he cites newspaper articles (El Pais, Le Monde, Guardian…) which at the time in 2010 had accused « Wikileaks » of publishing thousands of « unredacted » documents. This part of the indictment can already be understood as a trial of the press, since it relies on the press to provide evidence for an accusation, without the prosecutor however making explicit the exact role of Julian Assange in the structure or organization « Wikileaks ». The link between « Julian Assange, a man physically present here, and « Wikileaks », which the prosecutor does not specify « what it is » (NGO? company? website? according to the laws of which country?), is not proven other than by the prosecutor’s assertions: Julian Assange would be « Wikileaks founders » or « the puppet master ».

For those of us who have known for some time that John Shipton is the owner of the Wikileaks domain names within the Californian company Dynadot[6] and that Julian Assange was only an employee of the Wau Holland Foundation, which piloted the « 04 Wikileaks » project in Germany, It appears that it is not Julian Assange who is legally responsible for the actions of « Wikileaks » but John Shipton and the leaders of the Wau Holland Foundation such as Andy Müller Maguhn, Bernd Fix, Jens Ohlig, Winfried Motzus and Hendrik Fulda[7]. The prosecutor makes the point by quoting points from his documents… 15, 16 and 17, Julian Assange would have nothing less than facilitated the revenge of the Taliban after having hacked computers and stolen state documents in criminal association. He would therefore not be a journalist. Curiously, however, he is only « charged » with the documents published from September 2010 to November 2011. He is not charged for the film « collateral murder » nor for the « Spy files », those famous documents of widespread spying that so upset Chancellor Merkel when she discovered through them that her personal cell phone was listened to by the CIA.

These documents were so important to the leaders of Wau Holland Siftung that three of them traveled to London to prepare the press conference for the launch of these publications on December 1, 2011[1]. The prosecutor ends the tirade by mocking the media writing about the « 175 years in prison ». According to him the case law would show that the sentences for this type of crime only range from 48 to 65 months in prison. But just after we regain hope, he asserts that in this trial, there is no need for evidence, since it is an extradition trial. The evidence will be presented in the United States when Julian Assange is there.

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[1] http://www.wauland.de/media/2011_Jahresbericht.pdf, page 5

We feel like we are witnessing the curtain rising on a horror show. Baraitser raises it, we are chased out of the room. Julian Assange looks resigned but nevertheless raises his fist, without looking at the audience. The security guard chases us out of the fire escape and we find ourselves in the airlock, with the whole crowd. I quickly understand that there is no question of taking advantage of our 10-minute break because we will lose our hard-won seat. So I stay in front of the emergency door, trying to reason with my comrades the young free-rider who continues her asocial and disruptive behavior: she pushes us with her elbow, shouts that she is the most important and must remain so, proudly answers that she is 23 years old when we ask her what makes her think that she is entitled to so many privileges. She seems to be under the influence of substances and it is disconcerting to see someone behave like this in a court of law and to witness the total passivity of the officer in charge of order, who even lets her back in front of everyone in the gallery. Privileged, absolutely. Why, we don’t know then.

The hearing resumes as soon as Julian Assange returns, carrying the binder and a notebook in which he will try to write his little words. His face takes on an accusing look when he looks up at the first row of the audience. The prosecutor continues his charge: the thousands of leaked documents are detailed, Julian Assange is accused of having encouraged Manning to steal the documents by helping him to crack a password to access an army intranet. He wanted to undermine the security of the United States, especially since « Wikileaks » on its website « solicits the public to deliver secret documents. To support his claims and to bring a semblance of links between Julian Assange and « Wikileaks » the prosecutor cites the conference of the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin in late December 2009, where Assange would have presented this project as « the intelligence service of the people ». The Wau Holland Sitftung curiously does not appear in the prosecutor’s tirade, even though it assumes full responsibility for the Wikileaks project in its own activity reports from 2006 to 2014, as if the British state wanted to spare a German institution, in the midst of negotiations with Germany over the Brexit. Manning would have responded to Julian Assange’s requests and would have downloaded the encrypted documents from February until his arrest on 27 May 2010. The link between Manning and Assange would be provided by their communication on the Jabber messenger from November 2009 to April 2010. I am surprised to hear about the relationship between Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. I had been left with Julian Assange’s denials that he had ever been in contact with Private Manning and I had believed that Manning had dropped his information by talking to hacker Adrian Lamo[9] , who was mysteriously murdered in 2016 and that is how the military was able to find his identity. Jabber messaging was also a project of the Wau Holland Foundation since 2008[10] . It will be necessary for the prosecutor to provide technical evidence of the conversations on Jabber, records from Internet service providers, and not Manning’s confessions extracted after torture.

Despite the dramatic situation, John Shipton’s brother falls asleep in his seat. Julian Assange looks at Kristinn Hrafnsson with a resigned but angry expression. The RSF men leave. Garzon looks annoyed. Then the prosecutor moves on: the Taliban in Pakistan would have used the published documents to commit crimes, Julian Assange would have given « useful information to the enemy », he knew he was putting his sources in danger. This is very different from the first phase of the publications which targeted only the Chinese and the Syrians. In short, if Julian Assange knowingly gave information to the enemy, he can be accused of « intelligence with the enemy », thus of espionage. We hear the clamor of the Gilets Jaunes rising. Julian Assange surely hears it too… It’s loud.

He is fidgeting on his bench, looking for a position, writing something, can’t get rid of this tic that makes him blink and look for the light by raising his face upwards, towards us. Now the prosecutor will prove for an hour that the law on « conspiracy » is the same in Great Britain as in the United States, and already refute the arguments of the defense on the « abuse of authorities », i.e. the procedural flaws. Julian Assange seems to be doing better – he writes a short paper to Garzon. Baraitser was obliged to ask the prosecutor for the beginnings of evidence. He explains that if the newspapers helped to disseminate information to the enemy, then yes, they can also be charged. Clearly in « certain circumstances » the extradition treaty does allow for extradition on political grounds, anyone, British or otherwise.

Then I see Julian Assange raise his head and look at Angela Richter, sitting in the middle of the front row. He gestures to her with his hand, as if he wanted to chase someone away, indicating that he should leave. He clearly points to the door. I get the impression that Richter is embarrassed, she looks around to see if anyone else has figured out what is going on. The prosecutor says he doesn’t need to submit evidence, what he says is « self-sufficient », a curious category of law all the same. At this point Julian Assange looks very tired. He does not even have a glass of water in front of him, unlike the lawyers and journalists. He crosses and uncrosses his fingers, looks at the journalists… then he wants to speak! He stands up, holds his hands together in front of the glass and speaks. Baraitser wants to cut him off, telling him to speak through his lawyers. But he insists and wants to speak himself. We can’t hear what he says, because there is no microphone and we can only hear what is said directly into the microphones. Focusing on his voice muffled by the barriers, we think we hear him complaining about not hearing. And it is certainly not the decided slogans of the Yellow Vests that bother him, contrary to what Baraitser will argue. We do not let him continue to speak. A cardboard box is placed under Fitzgerald’s microphone to increase the volume… Finally, at 1pm Fitzgerald is allowed to start the defense. 20 minutes later Baraitser suspends the session for the lunch break. We are asked to leave the premises via the fire escape.

We only have 45 minutes, the cafeteria is tiny and the line is quickly huge. I am exhausted and I take a coffee at the vending machine before going back to the airlock. My friend who took the picture when Julian Assange spoke was immediately expelled from the building, she does not insist. I try to find out more about what Julian said by asking Fitzgerald in a corridor of the court. I can’t, he remains evasive. I hurry back to the airlock, because even if there are less people in the afternoon, it was predictable that some of them are more interested in their public relations than in the trial, Greekemmy is watching over them to introduce his own.

What exactly is Wikileaks?  Plea of Me Hamilton Fitzgerald

I managed to get back into the gallery without too much damage after waiting in the airlock and going up the fire escape, despite my fear of being pressured again by those present to give up my seat to someone « high up ». The vacated seats were quickly filled: Sevim Dagdelen and Heike Hänsel were seated next to Angela Richter. The young free-rider’s boyfriend blinks from behind me. Julian Assange enters the box at 2 pm. He is as sad as ever, sitting with his hands clasped, not looking at the family, not smiling at anyone… Hamilton Fitzegerald resumes his speech: he wants to rely on Article 10 of the extradition treaty, to present the « abuse of procedures », procedural flaws and to prove « on the basis of the Castillo and Murua jurisprudence » (probably Adgar Castillo against Spain – judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in 1998) that Julian Assange had in his action political opinions, that he is therefore being prosecuted for these opinions and that therefore the extradition treaty would be violated if extradition were to apply to his case. Furthermore, his extradition would expose him to inhuman and degrading treatment, the risk of suicide, and the risk of the death penalty. Then the lawyer quotes the witnesses who will appear: academics and journalists specialized in espionage and computer data leaks, Jamil Jabber from Columbia University, Michael Tigar, American attorney and professor, and also the very famous Noam Chomsky. Then the lawyer recounts the story of the « Wikileaks » publications: he tells how Bradley Manning said he downloaded the documents himself, contacted the Washington Post, and then decided in February 2010 to give everything to the « Wikileaks » website, including the film of the « air attack on innocent civilians in Iraq » and, on March 8, 2010, the documents relating to the Guantanamo Bay prison, guided by the idea that it was « in the public interest » to publish them. Passing quickly over the fact that it was the Obama administration that initiated the hostilities against Julian Assange, the lawyer charges President Trump by recalling his violent tirades against the journalistic profession. Gareth Peirce then goes to Julian Assange and hands him a document. He gets up with difficulty to take it, sits down and stares in front of him without moving.

Edward Hamilton then paints with a few flattering phrases the « Wikileaks saga » that lasted a few months, a year maximum in 2010 and 2011. In his mouth Julian Assange is mixed with « Wikileaks » without it being clear who decides what. He even credits the site as « catalyst of the Arab revolutions by exposing the corruption of the Ben Ali clan in Tunisia » which makes me smile a little. Through friends of UGET, Redeyef, the Patriotic Democratic Party that I supported in 2011, I know that Tunisians did not need Westerners to realize the violence and corruption of the dictatorship in which they lived. I also know that the real Revolution of December 2010 started from demonstrations launched by activists of the UGET, one of the oldest trade union organizations in Africa, just as the « Kasbah 1 » movement in February 2011 was initiated by two young girls desperate for repression, Zahra and Hawra Khammassi, Zahra being in charge of the UGET union at the Faculty of April 9. I hope one day to be able to get Julian Assange to meet the real protagonists of this story, but for that to happen, he has to get out of this jail. While the lawyer continues to explain the case, I finally see that Julian Assange looks at me firmly, I immediately respond by supporting his gaze. Then he looks more tired and the self-centered and repetitive gestures reappear: he rubs his fingers and again raises his head towards the ceiling as if he had a backache. But then I see even more clearly the look in his eyes that says he is suffering.

Fitzgerald then makes the trial of the company UnderCover Global, of the spying that it exercised on lawyers like Gareth Peirce, who will also be a witness, how it « poisoned » the relations in the premises of 3 Hans Crescent Street by abusing the good faith of Fidel Narvaez, head of security of the Ecuadorian diplomacy. It is in this context that Fitzgerald places the story he tells: that of Dana Rohrabacher, a senator close to Trump who came in 2016 to promise Julian Assange to let him out of his captivity in exchange for information allegedly given by the Russians. Fitzgerald again condemns the Trump administration as practicing political blackmail, seeking to extort benefits on the back of his client. I think the political narrative is getting a bit off track: for my part I would have liked to know more about the motivations of the Wau Holland Stiftung when it decided in December 2006 to « fördern », i.e. both support and execute, the 04 Wikileaks project[11].

As for Germany, journalists from Spiegel will play an important role as defense witnesses – Fitzgerald cites John Goetz and even Jacob Augstein, the son of Rudolf Augstein, the magazine’s founder, as witnesses who have always claimed that Julian Assange protected his sources and was never involved in hacking classified documents. Unfortunately, while the lawyer portrays a politically committed man, a champion of transparency and anti-imperialist struggle, the flattering praise has no effect on the morale of Julian Assange who seems immobile, locked in his suffering. I too am beginning to feel bad about witnessing his suffering, and it is not Fitzgerald’s words quoting a Chomsky charge about Trump that will give me confidence, as Obama is largely responsible for the « Julian Assange manhunt » as well. Finally, the lawyer addresses the hardest but most obvious: extradition will lead Julian Assange to undergo « degrading and inhumane treatment », the risk of a life sentence is evoked, and the conditions of imprisonment in the United States detailed. Finally, Fitzgerald exposes that his client’s living conditions, the fact of « being exposed with his family as a target », of being « exposed to isolation » has led his client, according to two doctors quoted, Dr. Crosby and Prof. Malon, to a « clinical depression ». Extradition will worsen his « fragile state of health » and lead him to suicide.

The curtain falls. Baraitser adjourns. Julian Assange raises his fist but looks exhausted. I refuse to leave our box until he leaves his. I observe his walk, his gestures, I observe the guards. Nevertheless, I could meet his eyes one last time. When I leave the building, a hundred journalists, some kneeling, are religiously listening to John Shipton. I recognize and greet some of my Yellow Vest friends. It is necessary to debrief and rest, to understand what is happening. Tomorrow I will come back.

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[1] https://courttribunalfinder.service.gov.uk/courts/belmarsh-magistrates-court

[2] https://www.thelawpages.com/magistrates-county-crown-court/Belmarsh-Magistrates-Court-106.html

[3] https://searchapplications.bromley.gov.uk/online-applications/propertyDetails.do?activeTab=summary&keyVal=L5YN3SBT06500

[4]

https://www.securinorme.com/prevention-au-travail/238-issues-de-secours-et-degagement-sur-les-lieux-de-travail-quelle-est-la-reglementation-

[5] https://appext20.dos.ny.gov/corp_public/CORPSEARCH.ENTITY_INFORMATION?p_token=72B2BC88F1ABEC29FC17342ED048F90C2CD3180F91B4ABC04CC549D1FF9DBC78DEDF372F0216B3421318E1E20D7C94DF&p_nameid=783838A9DC6C9F54&p_corpid=0DFAEC3F1D70B519&p_captcha=14488&p_captcha_check=72B2BC88F1ABEC29FC17342ED048F90C2CD3180F91B4ABC04CC549D1FF9DBC78250B421436A200E165E9DFBDDBEDCDA1&p_entity_name=%43%6F%75%72%61%67%65%20%43%6F%72%70&p_name_type=%41&p_search_type=%43%4F%4E%54%41%49%4E%53&p_srch_results_page=0

6.

[7] http://www.wauland.de/media/2011_Jahresbericht.pdf, report 2011

[8] http://www.wauland.de/media/2011_Jahresbericht.pdf, page 5

[9] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/wikileaks/interviews/adrian-lamo.html

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/19/760317486/the-mysterious-death-of-the-hacker-who-turned-in-chelsea-manning

[10] http://www.wauland.de/media/2009_Jahresbericht.pdf

[11] http://www.wauland.de/media/2009-12-28_Protokoll.pdf, Report of the Board of Administration of the Wau Holland, 28 december 2009

Monika Karbowska

I need to warm up and rest for long hours in my room to recover from my disappointment not seeing Julian Assange free nor seeing him at all. As always I feel as if all I have to do is see him, to open the doors of these dummy cages and to set him free. It is even more infuriating today when he is JURIDICALLY free and should NOT be locked up. I cannot bring myself to leave London because I still hope for a miracle, a turnaround. After all, the MET police have made it clear that Assange is a kind of private captive, an iron mask put on by political decision-makers without the freedoms and rights of a democracy being respected. But today we are whole peoples whose rights are being massively challenged by the political authorities and we are defending ourselves only weakly « in the hope that it will stop »!

The next day I go down to discuss in the cafés of Norfolk Place. The neighbour of the Frontline Club listens to my disappointment despite all my efforts the day before and tells me that she saw Vaughan Smith entering his club the same evening. She said to him « You must be sad that your friend has not been released », and Vaughan Smith would have answered, enigmatically, « We’ll soon see him ». Are there any secret negotiations for the release of Julian Assange conditional on his agreeing to some arrangement that he had refused until now? Perhaps.

I really want to go to the English side of the sea and spend a few days in peace and quiet. But the government has activated the covidian bans and I’m not so sure I’ll find a hotel in unknown places anymore. I first decide to take a tour of the city centre, Hyde Park and the Kensingnton and Knightsbridge area. On the 7th of January the atmosphere in this part of London is strange. A part of the population obeyed the fear of the epidemic, only went out for food shopping and wore masks. Another part of the population refuses to obey the injunctions of the political class and shows its disapproval simply by walking outside. The streets are covered by numerous MET cars which don’t stop anyone, but create a quickly heavy atmosphere. Londoners concentrate in the park as if they were meeting there. The weather is very cold and sunny, people walk, run, cycle, walk dogs, play with their children, feed squirrels, chat, drink tea, coffee and hot soup sold in a few take-away pavilions. They gather imperceptibly but in the park the police who patrol non-stop do not succeed in frightening them. It seems as if they are participating in a protest that is as silent as it is determined. I take part in the movement and I am happy to enjoy the air without a mask.

Back at my hotel, I prepare my departure to France but I am already thinking about my future return to London. Will Julian Assange be presented every 28 days for the famous « call over hearing » that brought me here for a year and a half? I want to check what English law says on this subject, although it is obvious that Assange is « outside the law », arbitrarily maintained since he is legally free and physically still captive. It was then that I discovered that on the internet that… the name « call over hearing » does not exist in British law! Everything the judge (or the lawyers I asked) said about Julian Assange’s obligation to appear every 28 days to extend pre-trial detention was FALSE ! Even the polish lawyers. They manipulated the truth. The name « call over hearing » exists only in Australian law and refers to hearings that prepare a « schedule » of the trial[1]. In UK law remand in custody is called « remand in custody », (I have heard Baraitser and others use this term more than 15 times) but it is NOT possible to extend this detention indefinitely. On the contrary, the limit of remand in custody is very clearly set out in the Act, by « Section 22 of the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985 (POA 1985), and the Prosecution of Offences (CTL) Regulations 1987 » and this limit is … 56 or 70 days for an offence tried by a Magistrate Court and 182 days for a crime tried by a Crown Court!

However, extradition is always tried by a Magistrate Court and Assange has been imprisoned for 20 months, more than 600 days, 10 times more than the legal standard of the Custody Time Limit.

I am amazed by this discovery and furious at having trusted judges and lawyers for so long and not having checked directly on the law!

But the best part is that « if the prosecutor fails to build the case for the prosecution within this time limit, the exception to the right to parole ceases to apply. The accused therefore has an absolute right to release »[2]!

The prosecution may apply for an extension of pre-trial detention, but cannot use as an argument its own inability to present valid reasons for imprisoning the citizen. If the prosecution is unable to bring forward any new elements within the shortest possible time, the citizen is released. The reasons for which the prosecution may request continued detention are the absence or illness of the accused, a judge or an important witness. The second reason is the existence of an ancillary procedure decided by the court if there is more than one accused or more than one offence.

I now understand what all the strange « secretarial » debates were about in the court proceedings against Julian Assange. I remember Clair Dobbin being « unavailable at that time », or the « judge so-and-so on a trip », or the « spanish witnesses » so indispensable that they alone justified Assange’s imprisonment… These procrastinations served to have a reason to prolong his detention!  [3]The famous « Spanish procedure » also served this purpose: to start a parallel trial to give Baraitser the opportunity to order Julian Assange to « you remand in custody » every month, 20 times, from September 2019 to December 2020! But the big problem is that Julian Assange’s lawyers played the prosecution’s game to the full, without ever protesting against the arbitrary imprisonment of their client! They were and still are totally complicit in the crime!

The only time the 28 days apply is when the Public Prosecution Service (Public Investigation Service, the prosecution system) arrests the person and has 28 days to compile an indictment file before they are obliged to present it to the judge. And again, in order to be able to require someone to be remanded in custody, the accusers must prove that a crime has been committed and that the accused can effectively evade justice. Julian Assange did not commit any crime, nor was he accused of any crime when he was officially imprisoned in May 2019: an extradition request is not a crime, a computer intrusion is not a crime, and interrupting his release on bail is not a crime either, just an offence for which one is punished by losing the bail money[4] .

 In the Assange case everything is done by all the protagonists in the game to create a false justice parallel with false laws and false procedures, as if the legal rules of Great Britain as a country did not exist, as if Assange was being tried in a foreign country, a parallel state, a « parakratos » as the Greeks so aptly describe their « deep state ». Parakratos is an illegal state ruled by the oligarchy, which makes a mockery of formal democracy. Great Britain is governed by a « parakratos » which makes a mockery of the « Custody Time Limit » and other human rights formalities in the case of Julian Assange.[5] In fact, the words « Custody Time Limit » were never uttered at any of the 20 hearings I attended, as if it were understood that for Julian Assange captivity will be « no limit ».

In any event, the trial must be held 182 days after the indictment, which must be presented no more than 28 days after the arrest, i.e. 6 months. I understand better why it was urgent that the trial at the Woolwich Court be held in February and why it was necessary to smoke « new charges » to put Assange back in captivity until the second trial in September.

The prisoner advice website in Britain is even more explicit about the rights of defendants and the presumption of innocence, explaining that there is a « presumption in favour of bail », conditional release. This means that it is up to the public authorities to prove that the accused must be kept in detention as he or she may abscond or interfere with the investigation. It is not up to the citizen to justify himself but to the prosecution. If the prosecution cannot prove the bad intentions of the accused, the accused is automatically released under certain guarantees such as a stable address or regular reporting to the police[6].

In the case of extradition, it is impossible for the prosecution to investigate the intentions of the accused since by definition the investigation takes place in a foreign country. That is why Poles who attend the Westminster Court are systematically released at the first hearing and present themselves free to the court afterwards. It makes sense: if the Westminster Court had to hold extended pre-trial detention hearings every 28 days for the thousands of extradition cases, the congestion would be such that it would be impossible to bring any case to a conclusion. Indeed I have never seen an Eastern European on the Westminster lists appear twice. Why didn’t that give me a clue? Because the lawyers and judges lied to me, lulled my suspicions into believing that in the case of Julian Assange everything was normal. As if Assange was some kind of monstrous criminal, an Elephant Man for whom special standards had to be created?

It is obvious that the grotesque Swedish European Arrest Warrant had to have the « rape » ticked in red, otherwise it would have been impossible to imprison Julian Assange in 2010, make him pay an expensive bail and keep him almost two years from December 2010 to June 2012 under an electronic bracelet.

A document from the Home Office for the preparation of extraditions after Brexit, dated 19 June 2020[7], even stipulates that the « Custody Time Limit » for extraditions is the same as for citizens prosecuted in the country, i.e. 56 days extendable to 70 days, maximum 182 days before the trial. Julian Assange has already served double the time allowed… and is still in captivity. The Westminster Court is even violating Home Office rules!

Moreover, this same document specifies that it is impossible to arrest a citizen without an arrest warrant. This seems obvious, but it must be remembered that no arrest warrant was ever presented to Julian Assange! Assange has slipped from his « punishment » for breaking an electronic bracelet in 2012 to indefinite captivity without ever producing an arrest warrant! Indeed, it was at the hearing on 20 September 2019, when he had FINISHED his sentence, that the arrest warrant should have been presented! What had happened then?

Assange was not presented in court and there was no lawyer! I saw it myself as it was my first time in Westminster Court. It is because we sounded the alarm that on 11 October 2019 the jailers were kind enough to show us on video a shaggy and ill-fitting Julian Assange as they would show an Edmond Dantes after years of oblivion… Needless to say that Assange’s lawyers were never overly moved by the « formality » of the absence of an arrest warrant as if they had already recorded the necessary return of our lives to the Ancien Régime….

I remember the resounding trials of Queen Victoria’s reign, especially that of the « telegraph boys »[8], those young proletarian boys raped and prostituted by prominent artistocrats: only intermediary pimps, were charged and convicted. The grandson of Queen Victoria, Victor Albert « Eddy » of Sachsen Coburg Gotha, heir to the throne, had been accused by witnesses and victims of participating in the rapes. The trial was interrupted to prevent the name from appearing in public, and the police had received such strong pressure from the palace that they were never able to complete their investigation. When in Britain it is impossible to name a name in a trial, one can be certain that it is a member of the ruling royal family involved in a dirty business. The rules of common law had been so massively violated that the opposition press was able to use the case as a weapon to challenge the legitimacy of the royalty. Today, with the lawlessness in the trial of Julian Assange we are decidedly not far from the Victorian era since even the procedures of the public prosecutor’s office no longer apply. Worse, unlike in the 19th century, the public is chased out of the court and the press is hand-picked!

Uncovering Cleveland Street: Sexuality, Surveillance and late-Victorian Scandal – NOTCHES (notchesblog.com)

Before leaving the neighbourhood I visit my acquaintances. For them there is no doubt that Julian Assange is more a prisoner of « Kensington » than of Belmarsh. The « Kensington system » is what was called in victorian times the captivity in Kensington Palace of the royal descendants that the rivals wanted to prevent from ascending to the throne. Victoria of Sachsen Coburg Gotha had been the first victim of the system when she spent an austere childhood in this manor house, as gloomy today under the guard of men in black with machine guns as it was when she was watched by her mother’s lover Marie Louise von Sachsen Coburg Saalfeld, a man named Conroy. King George IV’s entourage suspected him to be Victoria’s real father and wanted to send both mother and daughter back to Germany while Conroy manoeuvred her onto the throne to become the regent and guardian of what he wrongly believed to be a malleable person[9]. Contrary to the golden legend spread by the media since the advent of Elisabeth Lyon-Bowes as Queen of England, royal successions here have always been the result of sordid intrigues and coups d’état. The royal storytelling that Victoria mastered to perfection during her long reign and which has been pursued by modern means from 1953 to the present day should not give us any illusions. It is time to look into the turpitudes of royal power because it is more than likely that it is the royal power and not the government that is imprisoning Julian Assange.

---

[1]https://www.courts.qld.gov.au/courts/planning-and-environment-court/going-to-planning-and-environment-court/hearings-and-reviews

[2] « If the custody time limit expires : When the prosecution fails to comply with the defined time limit, the exceptions to the right to bail listed in Sch 1 of the Bail Act 1976 cease to apply. Therefore, in effect the accused is given an absolute right to bail »

https://www.inbrief.co.uk/court-proceedings/remand-in-custody-while-awaiting-trial/https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2012/10/part/3/chapter/4/crossheading/calculation-of-days-to-be-served/enacted?view=plain

[3] The application must be made before the expiration of the time limit. In considering whether to grant an extension the courts have regard to the criteria laid down in s 22(3) of the POA 1985. Under that provision the court must be satisfied that the need for the extension is due to any of the three specified conditions:

1. the illness or absence of the accused, a necessary witness, a judge or a magistrate;
2. the ordering by the court of separate trials in the case of two or more accused or two or more offences;
3. some other good or sufficient cause. »

[4] https://www.inbrief.co.uk/court-proceedings/remand-in-custody-while-awaiting-trial/

[5] https://www.sfo.gov.uk/publications/guidance-policy-and-protocols/sfo-operational-handbook/custody-time-limits/

Have you been ‘released under investigation’? The changes to police bail in the UK

https://www.bindmans.com/insight/blog/those-awaiting-trial-to-spend-longer-in-custody-the-ministry-of-justices-latest-attempt-to-tackle-the-backlog-by-extending-custody-time-limits

[6] « Bail
Unless your family member is remanded for one of the above reasons the court will remand the accused on bail  meaning they are free to leave the court but must attend on the next occasion. This is called the ‘presumption in favour of bail’.

The bail may be ‘unconditional’ or may come with a set of conditions such as they must live at a particular address, not associate with certain people or report to a police station regularly. This is known as ‘conditional bail’. If the person does not comply with the conditions they can be remanded into custody.

Serious cases
In serious cases where an individual has been charged with murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, rape or attempted rape there is no presumption in favour of bail and the individual will automatically be remanded into custody. »

https://www.gov.uk/charged-crime

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1988/jun/28/remands-in-custody-for-more-than-eight

Remand in custody | Prisoners’ Families Helpline

[7] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/extradition-in-criminal-investigation-cases

[8]

La reine Victoria – Jacques de LANGLADE – Google Livres

Jacques de Langlade, « La Reine Victoria », éditions Tempus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Street_scandal

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/an-irishman-s-diary-queen-victoria-s-dad-1.2164329

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_(Vereinigtes_Königreich)

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoire_von_Sachsen-Coburg-Saalfeld

[9] https://www.historyofroyalwomen.com/the-year-of-queen-victoria-2019/the-year-of-queen-victoria-birth-of-sir-john-conroy-mo/

My return home and France’s policy against England

It’s time to go home but there are no buses and the Eurostar prices are staggering. I find an Easyjet ticket not too expensive. Of course, I wonder about the PCR test that Macron has imposed on truck drivers in Dover and I know that this test is required for travellers from outside the European Union such as Serbia for example. But then it should be possible to do this test which I abhor on arrival at Roissy. I am consulting the company’s website, I also want to see what law governs this imposition. The Brexit is registered, a bilateral agreement governs the travel of the French to Great Britain and it is in virtue of this agreement that Great Britain let me enter its territory without a visa on January 2nd. But it is not easy to find this agreement. On the French websites it is about the quarantine requested by Great Britain and the form I filled in. There is no mention of what France requires of British nationals. It is the same thing on the English sites which logically inform me about British laws, decrees, circulars and not French ones. The media talk about a bilateral agreement on cross-border traffic signed on 24 December, Christmas Eve, to regulate the problem of lorries blocked at Dover. But the text of the agreement is not published in the Official Journal. There is a vacuum, as often now that the fact of the prince creates reality illegally in all arbitrariness.

As for Easyjet, you have to have already paid for your ticket to access the « conditions of access on board », that is to say the famous Passenger Locator Card, the form that checks your covid health status and which is as illegal as the papers that the DFDS company makes you sign. As it is illegal to collect health data on people, Easyjet does not brag about it and does not publish it in full on its website. On Friday 8th January I leave Paddington on a hopeful note (« I’ll see you soon! This circus will end! ») and take the train at Victoria Station to Gatewick, a town halfway between London and the South Coast. Gatewick is a brand new airport built for those low cost tourist and bustling journeys that are only a memory today whereas on March 11th last year, they were part of our daily life for better or worse.

What strikes me is the heavy silence in the huge, completely deserted passenger and employee terminals, except for a few lined security guards. I walk for a long time on the stairs, corridors and empty halls before arriving in a small space painted in orange « Easy Jet check-in ». A security guard with an Easyjet badge is sitting behind a gatehouse before the luggage is checked in. He does not check passports, only covid Passenger Locator Card and … PCR tests. He refuses to let me board without a PCR test. He does not want to hear my arguments that the information is not accessible on the company’s website. He doesn’t want to hear and he doesn’t understand that requiring a medical test for a trip is in fact a violation of human rights, the Constitutions, the ECHR, the Charter of Fundamental Rights etc. Of course, he has no idea that he, as a private individual, has no right to access medical information about me because it is covered by medical secrecy which is part of the right to physical integrity and privacy.

He is obtuse, stupid, unpleasant, he thinks he’s a little chief: the real kapo mentality that many previously normal citizens now endorse. He is not even moved by the fate of a woman stuck in this deserted airport who has paid for her ticket, which he knows Easyjet will never refund. (No traveller has been reimbursed by any airline since the start of the covid. The boxes are getting free credit from their former customers. Voracious capitalism is still there and Flixbus already owes me 400 Euros for bus tickets cancelled at the last minute for the past year). He doesn’t inform me, doesn’t help me in any way, pushes me aside like a useless object to meticulously check the papers presented to him by the few dozens of docile travellers like sheep who are afraid of not being able to go home without his imprimatur.

I’m falling apart. All this nervous tension and psychological violence is too much for me. Fortunately I am supported by the Wikijustice team. I ask for help from the French Consulate on whose site there is vaguely a list of companies doing the famous PCR test, the one that is used to rip us off in France by artificially increasing the number of « cases » to allow Macron to lock us up like cattle to the hut. It is indeed France that requires the PCR test of all travellers coming from Great Britain, including French nationals who are nevertheless entitled to go home and should be able to carry out the test on arrival at Roissy. The consulate employee is nice, but lost: « ah well, Easyjet doesn’t give an address or do the test on its website? Yet they had promised! And at Gatewick airport there is no mobile lab either? Yet the British had promised this during the negotiations? So we were fooled… « . And it’s the French citizens who pay.

I go to a pharmacy, the only shop open in the ghost airport. They do the test well, but it lasts a week. The mobile lab was recently in the car park, but there too you have to make an appointment and wait several days for the result. Incompatible with a plane to be hung the same day. The pharmacist advises me to pay an expensive Hillton hotel to wait for the test result at the airport. No, if I have to stay, because the plane to Paris has already left without me, I prefer to go back to more hospitable places like New Heaven, Eastbourne, Brighton, Worthing on the south coast.

I am exhausted when I take the train to the coast. But one problem after another has to be solved. I book as soon as possible the same nice hotel where I stayed on the way. The manager is a very affable young man who is in revolt against Covidien storytelling and the lockdown that is killing his business and the whole economic and social life of his region. He is happy to see me again and sorry for what is happening to me, the price of his room is much lower than what I could have hoped for in Normandy in France. One last debriefing with my friends from Wikijustice, an excellent fresh fish and chips for dinner (to take away but working very well) and I fall asleep under the weight of all these emotions and my anger against the system.

I am stuck in England while French propaganda is in full swing against the « English variant » whose inhabitants here are supposed to die massively. What I see doesn’t fit this scenario at all. I see towns where people collectively go out into the streets, parks and beaches, play sports, meet each other, eat out as much as they can to encourage their beloved shops. They don’t look at all terrified of disease. For them it’s politics. They don’t understand why the government persecutes them like this, but they don’t intend to die. When we discuss this further, they admit that their government is being undermined by the international mafias and networks that have a vested interest in the installation of the Covid dictatorship: the National Health Administration, the English social security system has been privatised and is in the hands of Big Pharma, the Imperial College of London pursues political goals that have nothing to do with public health, while Prince Charles is directly involved in the global food business and on 25 January will open the World Economic Forum in Davos with Karl Schwab, the propagator of the ideology of transhumanism, and Xi Jing Ping, the leader of China, who is thus asserting his power over a Europe in freefall.

Music resounds every evening in the small houses: the neighbourhood is usually a tourist centre, artists perform in bars and there is music, shows, bars, pubs, restaurants and hotels, shops that sell everything and nothing. The police don’t patrol much, but I understand that pub managers, artists and shopkeepers are afraid of raids and controls in the neighbourhood. So we keep a low profile. A 13-year-old girl is having a birthday party on Saturday night, I accidentally ring her parents’ doorbell but she doesn’t seem scared. No one is wearing a mask, I feel safe here too.

But I have to do everything I can to get back home while the FRENCH government is putting illegal obstacles in my way! Indeed, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that everyone has the right to leave their country and to come back! The government doesn’t have the right to embodie me to returning home! It is not up to the British to help me go home because I am not their citizen and it is logical that they don’t care about the illegal test that my government imposes on me! If I have to do a quarantine, it must be done in my country when I arrive on French soil!

The problem and the salt of the whole affair is that it is… very difficult to do a PCR test here because the English simply don’t do it ! Already the information is not easily available, you have to book the test on the internet. One of my contacts warns me: he is Greek and his aunt has been stuck in England for 10 days without being able to return to Greece because of this damn test that many EU countries now require travellers from the British Isles to take. She booked the test twice on the internet but the results take 4 days to arrive, and the test must be dated less than 72 hours before departure. Each time the 72 hours were exceeded and she lost the test money and plane tickets… I have to find a place to do the test physically, especially as I don’t see myself tampering with my nose on my own with the homemade swab provided in a kit as the « internet » test requires. I already know that this sample is painful and anything but harmless because it affects very sensitive and vital nerve centres in the respiratory tract…

Saturday morning, January 9th, I start looking for the test. I go to a large Boots pharmacy which is on the official lists of the English and French governments. No that’s not true, they don’t do Covid testing here. Maybe in the suburbs, in a place 30km from here where I have to go by train. I try at another big pharmacy but nobody there seems to care about testing either. I start to regret December when the Paddington pharmacy opposite the Imperial College of London had « here covid test » and nobody was bothering… Maybe I should have taken the test in London? But despite the alarmist media storytelling, there weren’t many ambulances around St Marys Hospital and no posters about the tests.

In desperation, in a cosmetics shop where I do some shopping, I ask the young saleswoman: what do you do if you have Covid symptoms? The young woman opens her round eyes as if she had never thought you could REALLY have Covid. She tells me that she would go to a local doctor, but would not do a test first. Does she know a doctor who does the test, like some people in London who get paid a lot of money by rich travellers who have to take the Eurostar? She replied that at weekends it’s difficult, but pointed to the local medical centre next to the station.

I quickly understand why, in case of real illness, she would prefer to pay a private doctor. The public medical centre is deserted. I am greeted freshly by a surly secretary who directs patients by telephone to teleconsultations. I see that refusal to treat in the public system is as widespread here as it is in Poland or elsewhere in Europe and that telephone medicine is also taking its toll. I would like to make it clear that I am not ill, but that I just need this bogus test to be able to cross the French border. Her colleague is kinder and takes pity on me, she is looking for a solution. She gives me the address of two private clinics in the area where the test can be done quickly with results available within 72 hours. One is closed, the other is not too far away.

I walk for 45 minutes in the pretty Victorian quarter while the inhabitants go out quietly for their afternoon stroll after shopping. I arrive in front of a modern and luxurious building. At the entrance is a young woman in a hostess uniform. After putting on the mask and gel, I notice threatening signs such as « stop covid, stay away, social distancing ». in the lobby, which looks more like a luxury hotel than a hospital. When I come in the young woman rushes in on me and then is devastated when she sees that I am not a « client ». No, we don’t test for travel. « But if you have covid symptoms, where do you go? « This woman’s reaction to my question is the same as that of the previous one: total incomprehension as if the covid didn’t exist and was just a movie story! I specify: « what do you do if you are really sick, you have a flu or bronchitis »? His face lights up a little under his mask: « I go to see a liberal doctor, and if I’m really ill I go to the public emergencey service. But she doesn’t seem terrified by this eventuality.

I don’t insist, I thank her and I leave. What can I do? Go to the public emergency services and beg them to do it for me? That’s when a friend who supports Assange contacts me and offers me help. She can give me the address of the place where the Germans have been taking the test since it is required by their own authorities, but it is in London. I get the address immediately but I still go to check the Boots pharmacy in the far suburbs by train. It is tiring and with the cold and stress I am exhausted.

Crawley is a small town in an industrial area and a railway junction to Porthmouth. On leaving the station I find myself in front of modern hangars, a bus terminal and a newer shopping centre. The atmosphere here is already much more Covidian than on the coast. All the major shops are closed, only the Boots pharmacy remains. Young people hang out in the centre because it was supposed to be their Saturday night meeting place, but security guards inspect the masks strictly and prevent the pharmacy’s customers from touching the products on the shelves. It’s gloomy. The dispenser is veiled, masked to the eyeballs and hidden behind a large partition window. She prevents me from bending down towards the hole at the bottom of the glass in order to stretch out my ear to hear her better: with the mask I can’t understand her. We end up talking through google translation. No, the pharmacy doesn’t do any covid test. It doesn’t understand why in the city centre they directed me here. The only solution is the private clinics in other cities, but they are closed at weekends. The PCR Covid test that Macron is so fond of and with which Mr. Drosten and his start up collect phenomenal money is shunned by even the most covid convicted English. I’ve come up short again.

I no longer have anything to do here in this region which is as big as the great suburbs of London, like the space between Paris and the Essonne, but I will never be able to find or make that damn test. I have to find a place in London. In the little station a friendly railwayman is nicely flirting with me by helping me buy my return ticket. As soon as I’m outside I take off the costume of the mask and try to walk around naturally with my face uncovered on the platforms. The man visibly appreciates it. We understand each other. Here people want to live, unlike in France. Walking towards my hotel I pass through the district of artists, craftsmen and antique dealers. I admire some showcases of jewellery, ceramics and old posters. Obviously deserted and despairing. But a small café is open and a good smell escapes from it. The young owner is Italian, she allows me to sit at the table while waiting for my hot chocolate. She is sorry she can’t serve me food, it is forbidden  » but we all hope that it will be over soon and we will live normally again ». That’s all we all hope for.

I finally buy some food in the big sandwich shop that sells ham and local meat next to my hotel, which I already know. Here there are no masks on the faces and we talk openly. The young waiter behind the counter is Swedish, he confirms that Sweden does not play the Covid game and is not doing any worse. But beware, not everything is simple: Sweden, so tolerant for its own people, protects itself from « foreigners » and requires a strict quarantine of each traveller, even with a Swedish passport. « It’s hard, I haven’t seen my family for a year, » concludes the young man modestly. In this suburb everyone is a migrant and even municipal posters announce « Europeans, you are welcome »!

His fellow cook is Romanian and he is much more vehement: he is my age, has experienced dictatorship and has understood that this is what is being put in place in the West. He tells me about the New World Order, the project to trace the private life of humans and the eugenic preparation of Pfizer sold under the name of vaccine. He tells me that forcing people to undergo medical experiments has been forbidden since the Nazi experiments in the camps, since Mengele. He tells me about the camps. He tells me about the war and Nazism. He is devastated by what the West has become. The Romanian migrant is much more aware of the seriousness of the situation than the young Swede, difference of historical experience.

The sandwich is excellent and good news arrives on my phone: my friend in London has managed to make an appointment for me in a pharmacy that does Covid tests even on Sunday. I have to call them back to confirm my details. A drawing solution thanks to the solidarity of Julian Assange’s support networks!

The English variant only exists in French propaganda

The next day Sunday 10th January I take the train to the familiar Victoria station. I have an appointment at one o’clock and I take advantage of the time ahead of me to wander through the beautiful districts, Knightsbridge with the Harrods opposite the Ecuadorian flat where Julian Assange was kidnapped, then the Kensington and Chelsea Borough, a « royal borough », that is to say a commune that depends exclusively on the royal power and not on the government or a municipality, as indeed Plumstead, the commune where the Belmarsh prison is located, depends on the Royal Borough of Greenwich. As in France, the fashion for masks is mainly the preserve of wealthy neighbourhoods, whereas proletarians prefer to preserve their ability to breathe. In Chelsea, adults even mask their grandchildren, although this is not compulsory. The atmosphere is therefore rather unpleasant, despite the few cafés open where I can eat without being able to sit down or warm up.

The Chelsea Pharmacy Medical Center is located at 61-62 Sloane Avenue. I take a deep breath and call my friends before going home. I have to check in at the counter and pay first. 170 Euros is HUGE, more expensive than travelling from France to England and back! Then a young medical secretary takes me to the basement. I’m suffocating under my FFP2 mask which I’ve taken on purpose to be taken seriously. The test’s clientele are not sick people, but inhabitants of this rich neighbourhood who want to travel, I can hear it in their conversations. I explain that I am also in this case and that I just want to go back to France, aware that it is the French government that requires me to take the negative test. And what will become of me if the test discovers my antibodies or bits of viruses from last year? How many cycles will the amplification be? The secretary doesn’t know. She sets me up in a small and sinister doctor’s office despite its sterile whiteness.

She gives me two papers to fill out, one medical type form (do I have covid symptoms, am I taking medication?) with my address and another that looks like an administrative form for the National Health Administration. I don’t have the time to understand all of these documents that the doctor already has. She is young, Indian origin, very masked and not at all pleasant. She doesn’t behave like a doctor but rather like a laboratory technician. I explain to her that the covid I had and precisely for this reason I am afraid of having a positive test. I even brought a part of my medical file which she can read, if she is a doctor… But she is disdainful, sweeps my file away, doesn’t let me talk and doesn’t listen to me. What she tells me is stereotyped propaganda about the covid which give me nothing. I’m looking at a typical Big Pharma employee, cold, methodical and authoritarian. She refuses to answer my questions about the number of amplification cycles of the test. She assures me that the test can only show « if I have been in contact with Covid in the previous month ». Good. Does it detect the English variant? Because that’s what Macron requires of us French people so that we can return to our country.

The woman raises her eyes to the sky and says « But there is no such thing as the English variant! It’s the same virus! I smile « so you confirm that it was the French government that invented the story of the English variant »? His silence is worthy of assent. My second question is even more delicate. On the first form I have to sign that I agree that in case of a positive test, it will be transmitted to the National Health Administration. Of course I don’t agree but I want to go home and my own government is blackmailing me?

What will happen to me if the test is positive? Will I be forcibly quarantined here? (Which would be illegal?) If so, who will pay for my stay and for my loss of earnings because I won’t be working? The woman doesn’t really know, but since she wants to be dominant, she tells me « I have to pass this information on to the authorities ». I won’t know any more. The technician puts me in front of a bed, tells me to take off the mask « for her » and pushes the long pole up my nose. It hurts like hell, and I have a thought for the poor Polish truck drivers who get their noses punctured 2 or 3 times a week each time they deliver in England and then drive back to the continent. In fact, the injury will take 10 cheeks to heal and several neurological after-effects will come back because obviously a major nerve is damaged in the airways. This test is a useless and dangerous torture for your health. I shout, the woman is not happy with my behaviour, but I tell her that I suffered a lot in March, deprived of care and taken too late to the hospital because of the lockdown policy.

She doesn’t want to hear about what the real covid is, she puts the swab in a little box that looks like a pregnancy test and leaves the room telling me to wait 10 minutes. I immediately call my friends because I feel oppressed in this room in the basement where I am locked in. And if the test is positive, will I be able to run away from here? How can I be sure that my rights will be respected? I think then that the medical experimentation camps for prisoners at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau[1] were clean and looked like state-of-the-art hospitals of the time. The selected prisoners might have thought they had a better chance of surviving there than in the misery and filth of the camp, but in fact the torture in white coats was worse and very few survived.

The lab technician posing as a doctor has the right mentality in every respect. Besides, when she comes back and looks at the box, she doesn’t say « your test is negative », but « you can go home », as if she had already realised that my basic rights to live at home will now be subordinated to the torture I have to endure and she can inflict on me. This is the fascist world that they are putting in place for us.

I ask her what time the results will be available and all I can think about is running away from this detestable place. In fact the sample is sent to a real laboratory that will confirm the analysis and they will send me the result by email within the day. I leave sounded but relieved and I just want to relax and forget about the strange times we live in.

I spend the rest of the day walking around the nice and chic Pimlico area watching Londoners continue to defy the illegal lockdown bans by going out with family and friends. I take the train in the evening to my artists’ hotel and my warm fish and chips from the seafront. The signed « Wandsworth Medical Center » document is emailed to me at midnight. I can take the morning boat, if DFDS accepts me on board. Wandsworth, another commune where the royal prisons are located.

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[1]

Les expérimentations médicales à Auschwitz Clauberg et les femmes du bloc 10 – YouTube

Nazi human experimentation – Wikipedia

Medical experiments / History / Auschwitz-Birkenau

The victims of unethical human experiments and coerced research under National Socialism (nih.gov)

Back to the french police

The morning is grey and wet but I am enjoying my bus ride from my hotel to New Heaven Harbour on the waterfront boulevard. The sea is grey, green, iridescent, magnificent at the foot of the chalk cliffs. I find the ferry waiting for the loads and the few travellers at the small ferry terminal. At the ticket office, the employee with a closed face puts on her mask when she sees me and doesn’t want to look at anything but the test. It takes her 10 minutes to check the validity of my paper by going through her computer, then she agrees to sell me a ticket to Dieppe and looks at my passport. I pay 30 euros and wait for boarding which will take place after a search of our luggage by 3 security guards that is as absurd as it is meticulous, while there are only 6 of us passengers on a huge empty ferry – 3 teenagers returning from a concert because they are carrying musical instruments including a violin, a young French-English couple and me.

Before boarding the ferry I witness a scene that says a lot about the atmosphere in England. While I am waiting for boarding, a panic-stricken man rushes towards the ticket office. He asks in an English man with a strong Eastern European accent or to do a covid test because he wants to get home to the continent as soon as possible. I think he’s a truck driver. The counterwoman and her colleague shrug their shoulders and don’t want to help him at all. « We are not the government, » the woman even tells him, sending him for a walk. The man is about to leave and I understand the despair in his eyes. I approach him and ask him for his nationality. He is Bulgarian. Half in Russian, half in English, I explain to him how I took the test and I take my phone and give him the address in Chelsea. It is then that the DFDS employees, seeing me doing it, call the man back and give him a paper at the counter. Before going out, he comes to thank me and shows me what they gave him: the address of a laboratory in the city!  Did they initially refuse to help him out of racism? Or for not taking part in the covidian bidding war that the locals don’t particularly like? I won’t know, but the incident leaves one wondering.

I spend 5 delicious hours in the boat admiring the landscape, the cliffs, the green sea, breathing from the top of the last bridge, full of lungs! The ticket entitles us to an excellent dish of the day at the ferry’s restaurant. I then realise, sitting at the bar table in front of the sea, that this is the only place where I can sit at the restaurant, for the first time since last October 14th… For once I am a privileged person!

I am worried on arrival in Dieppe despite the beauty of this crossing. Dieppe with its masks on the beach and its sinister madness, I don’t want to linger there any longer. We still have to go through the French border whereas the English authorities let us out without control. We get off the ferry and a small bus leaves us in front of the Police aux Frontières guardhouses in the ferry terminal. The three teenagers are picked up by an adult, they must be local as the police don’t even look at their papers. So I am the last one to present, again the covid test and my passport. I am angry about the illegal control of the test but obviously I don’t say anything about it.

Two young cops from the french border police are watching me in a backstabbing attitude, camped on their legs and clinging to their guns. One of them says to me, « Where do you come from, madam »? « From the boat » I answer. « But from where? » he insists. « The boat comes from England, I didn’t swim across the sea! This is the moment when I can take off the damn mask for the identity check. I find myself alone without a mask in front of 5 masked male cops. But I can smile at them to defuse the charge. The young cop hasn’t managed to catch me. He actually wants to know what I did in England, where I was, but in reality he doesn’t have the right to interrogate me. What I did in England is only a matter for the English authorities, if I am in order with them. It is the principle of sovereignty over a territory: each person is master in his own country and not in the other. The French police will have to revise the philosophical principles of law and the legal texts!

The man keeps trying to trap me. « You bought something in England »? He’s not a customs officer, the customs officer is just checking my passport. I laugh as I turn to him: « Fish and chips especially! Everything is closed! But I enjoyed spending a few days in a country where they don’t impose the mask outside! ». I come back to the customs officer: « You know, for your health, you have to breathe, without a mask! Oxygenate yourself! Don’t you need to breathe sometimes? « I get bolder: « How old are you? Because after the age of 45, you know, breathing is no longer an option, but a necessity! ». The policeman is very young, the customs officer is my age. He looks at me under his mask: « Madam, everyone wants to breathe ». I reply: « You’re right. It’s a pity that the mask is compulsory on such a beautiful beach in Dieppe. It doesn’t make you want to stay for a holiday ». The youngster has received his lesson, the mask should not be a taboo subject.

Dieppe is always so sinister with masked passersby and all the restaurants that are double-booked. I don’t stay and I head towards the station. The SNCF-( train) employee demands a « special travel authorisation » from me, I am stunned. His colleague takes him back « no, the curfew is still at 8 pm, 6 pm it will be next week ». The SNCF is already knows Macron’s plans against us. The agents, formerly on the left, not only don’t oppose them while their town is dying, but even beat the Führer in a zeal for kapos.

I am sad and I would like to leave as dry as I am. But to go where? If France falls, the whole of Europe will fall, even the English are counting on us for the Resistance. It’s so hard. But at least we’ve fought a successful battle, Julian Assange is still there. We’re going to fight to get him out and free ourselves. We were effective, we will be effective again. I thank Heaven and my friends for this hope.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Preamble

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction. 

Article 1.
 

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2.
 

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 3.
 

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 4.
 

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 5.
 

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 6.
 

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 7.
 

All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Article 8.
 

Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

Article 9.
 

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 10.
 

Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

Article 11.
 

(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

Article 12.
 

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 13.
 

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Article 14.
 

(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
(2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 15.
 

(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.

Article 16.
 

(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Article 17.
 

(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

Article 18.
 

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19.
 

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 20.
 

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
(2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

Article 21.
 

(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Article 22.
 

Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

Article 23.
 

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24.
 

Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Article 25.
 

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26.
 

(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

Article 27.
 

(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Article 28.
 

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Article 29.
 

(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 30.
 

Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

Centre of London deserted and closed

Monika Karbowska

On the evening of the 4th January I am still looking for food in a deserted City. Only a Japanese restaurant sells take-away food under threatening posters(« don’t touch this! Don’t touch that! Don’t go into the shop if you have covid symptoms! Disinfect your hands! « ) I can’t wait to move to a friendlier neighbourhood. In the morning when I leave the hotel the feeling of desolation is even stronger. Not only are the offices, hotels and flats for rent are empty, but the shops are closed, forbidden to work or outright bankrupt. I stop in front of two small shopkeepers who will soon reach the cemetery of Covidian capitalism: a law bookshop opposite the Royal Courts of Justice (Court of Appeal) and a men’s clothing shop. It’s a pity because the bookshop has a book in its window that would have interested me: its title is « fake justice, fake law ». There are surely elements in it to understand how a fake trial can be held in a real court with a fake prisoner but real jailers and guards. The clothes shop moves me even more with its beautiful British tweed jackets and eccentric colourful socks – 70% off, it’s an atmosphere of definitive end[1].

In front of the yellow, purple, red and orange colours of the socks I remember the ones we sent to Julian Assange in two parcels in September 2019 when we were trying to get in touch with him and thought it would be feasible to visit him. The Belmarsh Visitor Center staff had advised us to send him a package and as the only package allowed to prisoners past 28 days was underwear and socks, we chose beautiful socks in the most flamboyant colours. « He seems to like socks » – we thought to ourselves as we thought of those curious pictures of Julian Assange in socks staged by the media. Belmarsh Prison never received the package, which remained in the mysterious vaults of the Royal Post Office, which also never returned the package to us undelivered. This is how we had the first serious doubts about Julian Assange’s presence at Belmarsh, because all prisoners, even the most heavily convicted, can receive letters, parcels, visits, mail and money there.

The City is a ghost town but when I go beyond the boundary of Westminster the situation is not much better. On the main shopping street Strand Street from the High Commission of Australia to Charing Cross tube station near Trafalgar Square is the berezina: all the shops are closed and nearly a third of them are already for sale. The lockdown, locking, closing, is here as in France a gigantic operation of artificial destruction of capitalist value, an auto-da-fé from which a brand new capitalism will emerge, over-powerful world oligopolies will be born on the ruins of the old world. But as my Polish anti-Covidian friend Jacek Nowakowski has said from the beginning: capitalism does not participate in a contest of who is the most effective in saving humanity. Capitalism destroys humanity for the benefit of a handful of powerful people, it is destruction even as it so well shows in the 20th century. Whoever does not see that the covid is an operation of destruction, a merciless economic war on the backs of the people must imperatively stop believing that he is doing politics and go back to cultivating his garden.

Tomorrow these shops will no longer exist, but there will be something else, as always, which will satisfy the possessing elite of the moment. As for our lost lives, our culture in tatters, this is not the business of the capitalists, as the thurifers of « creative destruction » paid by the American foundations in Warsaw when they strategically annihilated the structures of Poland Peoples’s Republic, my culture and my social and political base in 1991, explained it to me so glibly. He who is stronger is right, because he is the strongest. This is the evidence.

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[1]Lipman&Sons, London’s menswear specialists for hire or purchase (lipmanandsons.co.uk

Paddington in the lockdown

I am joining Paddington as soon as possible as there is rumour in the french media that the trial may take place this afternoon in Westminster Court. My hotel is still in the same block close to Norfolk Place and the Frontline Club. The Cypriot owners will be very kind and will make my stay easier without asking for a Covidian certificate. Maybe they are part of the neighbourhood’s resistance against the lockdown. In Paddington many shops are open, even though the restaurants have few customers and take-away sales are restrictive and bring little profit. The Frontline Club with its luxury organic restaurant is closed, but my yugoslavian Fish and Chips and my cosmetics drugstore are working normally. The chichas restaurants and cafés around the Moroccan consulate still gather their clientele even if there is a certain heaviness in the air due to the increasing number of masked walkers, including children. As masks are not obligatory, it is understandable that they are sincerely afraid of the disease.

The Westminster Court also works at full capacity as on a normal day. I walk along the former Church Army maternity hospital for poor women, which adjoins the building and shares its basement with the courtyard. Begun in October, the major works have turned into a huge asbestos removal operation and the palisades encroach on the esplanade in front of the entrance to the court offices. I enter the court without any problems and I walk through the corridors inspecting the lists of those on trial. No Julian Assange, but about fifty Eastern Europeans, either extradited or tried for minor offences. They are spread over the 3 floors of the building in rooms 1 to 10. The waiting corridors are filled with men, women and children, there are indeed between 150 and 200 people in the Westminster Magistrate Court building on 5 January 2021 at 2pm. And that will be important the next day.

I recognise the faces of some of the prosecutors, solicitors and registrars. One of the public prosecutors who prosecute Eastern European migrants the most is the Public Authority Transport – fines to be paid, perhaps for not wearing a mask. Unfortunately on the second floor I come across one of the black security guards who often works during the « Assange case » and who is more severe than the others. Unfortunatly, she also recognises me and by the look in her eyes I understand that this is not good for me. She will certainly communicate to the authorities that I am already there, the assiduous Franco-Polish woman of the Assange trial. I couldn’t afford to avoid her and with my purple hat and blue coat I am more than recognisable.

I ask the young veiled secretary at the counter if it is indeed Julian Assange’s « application for bail » hearing here tomorrow. She leaves to find out in the office, when normally everything should be written on her computer. Assange is a special case which is obviously not recorded in the registers. She comes out to tell me « yes, it’s tomorrow, 10 o’clock ». I can communicate it to everyone on Facebook, we have to give the most reliable information possible.

I can then go and eat a good meal and chat in the local cafés where I learn a lot. We discuss the situation in our countries, Londoners are concerned about the violence in France. At home the fear is rather economic, because despite the bans imposed by the government, they don’t seem to be afraid of the police, but rather of losing their livelihood, as the neighbourhood was deserted while it lived from tourism. A manager explains to me that the state’s help is limited to paying a few bills, whereas you have to be able to eat and pay the flat’s credit or rent. An owner of a regular café tells me that people are afraid to go to hospital. Indeed, even in an institution as venerable as St Marys Hospital where Fleming discovered penicillin in 1947 and where Diane Spencer’s children and royal grandchildren would have been born, there have been two cases of 60-year-olds who entered for minor ailments, died in the night and immediately stamped « covid deaths » « without the families being able to save their loved one or defend themselves. The same scenario of criminal policy is being implemented everywhere, sowing terror and leading to distrust of the most established health institutions.

To prepare myself for the endurance test of the next day, I buy a nice box of dates and camel milk for breakfast at a nice Moroccan grocery store open late at night.

The ordeal of the battle: storytellers, private militia and various police forces

I leave at 5.30 am and arrive in 5 minutes. And I am heartbreaking. At 5.35 am Greekemmy and her friends  are already in front of the door sitting on deckchairs and equipped with termos of hot drinks. They may have spent the night there, which I can’t afford for health reasons, it’s far too cold. Nor can I bring camping equipment, as it will be refused in the court while they can leave it with their staff. Moreover, if the police are looking for me I will be wrong as a foreigner. Greekemmy and Deepa sleep wrapped up in their jackets, two young men chatting outside the door with one of their older friends. Behind them Sabine and her son greet me: Arrival at 4 o’clock, everyone was already there, she is a good sixth in line. I had no chance of being first today.  But I settle valiantly behind Sabine with my dates and camel milk and my other treasures to share.

I stay up like this from 5.30 to 9.00, three and a half hours. When it rains I open my umbrella, I can’t sit down, I can’t move, I can’t get too close, « social distancing » obliges me. Torture. A blonde girl arrived just after me and rushes in front of the door to chat with the young man closest to the entrance. She looks like one of those journalist « puppies » stipulated by the Center for Investigative Journalism who haunted the Woolwich and Old Bailey trials without understanding anything about Julian Assange’s fate and without really taking an interest in it.

It’s not the legal proceedings she’s discussing with her buddy, it’s more like light flirting. I’m not happy but I can’t do anything about it. I just hope that with 40 seats in room 1 which we know well, even with the most severe Covid we should be able to get 10 to enter… Especially since 2 hours later we are actually only 20 in line for Assange’s trial.

Those who create the crowd on the small square are the 200 journalists and reporters who set up their heavy equipment in front of the door. They even have umbrellas stretched over static cameras mounted on tripods on the pavement. Their lenses are pointed at the entrance as if the journalists are certain that Julian Assange will appear and that they don’t want to miss a second of his precious speech. I tell it to Sabine who confirms that this may be a clue. I notice several Russian channels and agencies, RT of course, but also Ruptly, Rossia Siegodnia 1 and Spoutnik who had contacted us. It’s the first time that there are so many of them, next to the Anglo-Saxon, French, RTL… I suddenly feel full of hope that Julian Assange is free and that I can finally talk to him for the first time. I am ready to communicate with him.

However, our wait is really long as the journalists fill the small square and record everything that happens. The atmosphere changes. It is no longer intimate like when we used to meet only the same people here. We must remember that for 1 year, from September 2019 to August 2020, interest in Julian Assange was at its lowest. When our citizen actions brought him up from the « Dark Place » (as he says in his SOS letter to Wikijustice) and finally won a first battle, suddenly it was the media crowd. Success has a lot of fathers, but they were not very active in the struggle, I’ve been witnessing it here since September 2019! The atmosphere is more like the hypocritical and stifling « rock star welcome » that prevailed in July 2010 when Julian Assange was staged at the Frontline Club for the most important Wikileaks launches.

« Sometimes you couldn’t even go through the street, there were so many cameras. And he couldn’t even lean out of the window because he was constantly being chased for a photo. It was like being on a film set, » – an eyewitness living in the neighbourhood told me. Julian Assange, an unknown hacker who suddenly appeared out of nowhere to create a buzz? Rather a personality who was already important in early 2010 for the political-media system as soon as it was launched, just like a fad in the music or film industry.

The sun rises around 8.30 am and illuminates a frozen sky. I’m freezing when everything rushes by and I may be unresponsive. Just before 9 o’clock a group of security guards open the front door. They are not the same ones we usually see and they are not the same faces I saw the day before. Of course the company has changed, but some of Mitie’s former employees have been taken over. Today it’s young people dressed in strange, brand new fluorescent jackets like construction workers who take their jobs in the airlock in front of the door that opens. They look very unexperienced for security guards in charge of managing a large flow of people. But then a third character appears who we knew well from 11 October 2019 to 19 February 2020 but whom I hadn’t seen since, during the July, August and October sessions. It was Mitie’s manager who managed the list of Greekemmy in October 2019, who was watching Assange during the hearing of the « Spanish instruction » in room 4 on 20 December 2019. He is also the man that Assange was so visibly afraid of when he appeared in the box on 13 January 2020 and we were able to communicate with him by looking at him. The corpulent Indian man was present in the courtroom in the afternoon and we felt that his presence intimidated Julian Assange.

For all these reasons, and also because I have not seen him working outside the Assange trials, I am increasingly convinced that this man does not work for the court but only for the organisers of this « private trial », not really linked to the British Ministry of Justice.

Today our man is wearing a navy blue jumper, a badge on a cord and a black mask. He stands in the doorway as we tighten the queue so as not to lose our seats. Already some voices are asking the blonde girl to move aside as she is only 8th in line after me. She obeyed reluctant. Far behind me I had spotted Georgia. This time she shouldn’t be able to get in as she is in such a bad position. But now I see her greeting me from afar and then… walking up the whole line with the quiet nerve of the one who knows she is right and standing behind me… She makes conversation with me, asks for news and greets Sabine. I expect protests from the others, but no, nobody moves. Once again I have proof that she is part of the trial scenario. She is definitely going to come in.

I am keeping calm while the pressure builds up. The manager says (and it’s always so difficult to understand through the masks) « only 5 people will be able to go home, 8 with the family ». It’s consternation, panic. But there are 40 places in the hall! I’m trying to parley, we’ve already been in Room 1, he knows it, he was there in October 2019 and January 2020! But the man is hard and inflexible « because the Covid ». The Covid serves the interests of the dominant system by preventing citizens from controlling what happens in public places! Why is it impossible today to be more than 4 in this huge empty building, when the day before I saw 200 people at the same time in this same building from 2 to 5 pm! The Covid is mainly used to chase us out of Julian Assange’s trial! Besides, this trial seems to be the only action at the Westminster today, the families of the East European extradited persons are absent and the lawyers of the other cases will be a handful.

Especially as « the family » is not there! We are all Julian Assange’s family! The manager keeps a list with names, someone asks him why he is reserving seats for a family still absent when the court is opening and the journalists are rushing? He answers: « It is the lawyers who give the name of the family ». We have the answer that is the decision-maker for the attribution of the title of « family » to the different activists or employees of the Wikileaks group. However, at this moment neither Fitzgerald nor Summers are present, we continue to protest, in view of the hours spent in front of that damned door.

Previously it had always been possible to enter and the selection was made in front of the courtroom. In the meantime Fidel Narvaez has arrived and without queuing he takes the place of a friend of Greekemmy. The first two young men in front of the door, the one who is a trainee of the CIJ as well as the one who introduced himself to me as an actor, are already entering. Greekemmy embrace Deepa: she is sure that she has definitively pushed me out of the game. The two women enter with Narvaez. The manager then lets a few people through with a small blue press card. Surprise, Georgia has pushed everyone again and she is standing in front of me. I see her showing the man a small white plastic card with two brown stripes. She works well for an important institution, probably a government institution, and this mysterious card is the sesame that opens the doors of this trial for her every time.

So Sabine protests, asserts her status as Julian Assange’s « personal friend ». But to prove this, Fitzgerald must be present. We beg the cerberus to at least let us enter the building to go to the toilets because we are standing here without moving for 4 hours in the freezing cold, a temperature below zero! He refuses « because covid ». In the stress Sabine’s son starts crying and shouting, the crowd of journalists press us, it’s confusion. It is only because of the presence of the child that the cerberus that was so frightening to Assange allows him to go to the toilet. When she comes back, she tells me that she couldn’t get into the room and only saw Assange through the small window in the door.

The chief « manager » pushes us back to the right side of the door without mercy, under the pretext of letting the few lawyers from the other trials in. He has only the word « covid » in his mouth, whereas it is all too obvious that he is not acting as a security professional: by pushing back 25 people, he pushs us to the 200 journalists armed with their equipment. We are trapped between him, the wall and the crowd. We are squeezed together as we were at the time of the Woolwich Court trial in February last year. Managing crowds in such an unprofessional way is dangerous. In this type of situation you have to create a flow to avoid blockages and panic. He and the organisers of the meeting are so obsessed with the idea of not letting ANY stranger in the seraglio see Assange (and the negotiators for his release?) that they have decided to disregard the safety instructions and turn us away by blocking us in front of the door even if it means putting people in danger, epidemic or not.

I am very angry and I try to counter-attack: I ask our man his name. He knows he has to answer me, but mumbles an inaudible sound behind his mask. I hear something like « Anish, Anishou » but no last name. I go one step further, tell him I don’t understand and take his badge in my hands to read it. Neither his company name nor his name is on his badge. He only has a simple visitor’s badge. So he does not work for the Westminter Court. It has long been suspected that he is not actually a professional security guard. Who is he and who does he work for then?

The man does not have time to react until the police arrive. It’s the MET, the Metropolitan Police of London, recognisable by the black and white checkerboards on their headgear and their fluorescent chasubles. Usually they are few in number and rather peaceful. We have rarely had to deal with them as they only come to manage the traffic on the street and there hasn’t been a crowd at the Westminster for Assange since at least 21st October 2019! But today 30 people dressed in brand new uniforms arrived, wearing handcuffs, truncheons and black masks. The mask generally has the effect of depersonalizing the relationship and the power of the police is reinforced since we are no longer for them humans with emotions but objects to be managed. Their chief makes « Anushi » open the second entrance door to make the traffic more fluid: the journalists rush in immediately, take photos of the entrance hall, which has the effect of relieving the pressure on us who are stored to the right of the main door. I’m first in line, everyone else presses on my back, including the young freeloader from earlier who feverishly activates her professional camera.

But the policemen form a cordon to protect the front door and push us to the right again. This is not very professional either, as we risk being crushed against the wall. I try to resist the physical and psychological pressure. At first I try to coax the young security guards but they are inexperienced and give me a sign that « it’s not up to us ». When two imposing policemen land between the door and me, I am forced to retreat a little, but I persevere.

I tell them that I need to go to the toilet, that I’ve been waiting for 4 hours in the cold, but the man sends me back to the Marylebone station. However, he has a friendly voice and I continue the dialogue by softening my tone. I tell him that I represent an association for the defence of human rights and that it is curious that we cannot see Julian Assange to testify about the trial, the state of the political prisoner… The policeman listens to me and says « I understand you ». So, emboldened, I declare that it is not normal that it is not him who keeps order in the court but a private company. He confirms « I am not allowed to enter ». « Because it is a private building, isn’t it? « I continue.

 « It belongs to Prudential, doesn’t it? A private company. So a private company can rent rooms for the court but also for any other private event and this is a private event »? The man nods. He actually behaves like one works in the events sector: the private security agents hired by the event organisers secure and filter the private space where the event takes place, while the police, in case of a large crowd, logically manage the public space, the street. It’s sewn with white thread, it’s like being in a film. That’s why there was no covid yesterday when the real Westminster Magistrate’s Court was sitting, which rents its rooms from Prudential according to the land register[1], and that’s why today the covid is used as a pretext to prevent me from entering. The organisers of the event only want Greekemmy, Deepa and Narvez as witnesses. That’s all they want. Besides, Rebecca Vincent in a red coat gets turned away. A little later Elliot and Esther Shipton will try their luck like in the Old Bailey but will not be more successful in the absence of John Shipton, despite two Australian passports in Esther’s hand. They are not useful today for the organizers of the show.

At 10 o’clock there is still no Julian Assange’s « family » and there are still in theory 4 places left. I try again the negotiation. But from behind my back comes Craig Murray, looking lost. « Anushi » allows him to enter the airlock while waiting to have a lawyer on hand to confirm his presence. Of course no one presents any identification, as usual in the Assange case, whose identity is as uncertain as that of his alleged parents, fiancées, wives and children. Suddenly, Craig Murray, stressed out, turns to us to ask… for a pen! The woman behind me gives him his. A journalist without a pen, unfortunately I can’t help him.

Shortly after 10 o’clock the pressure of the journalists on us becomes intense: they photograph Stella Morris approaching the front door. Kristinn Harfnsson and Joseph Farell frame her like two bodyguards. She seems disconcerted and angry at not being able to enter immediately like a star because « Anushi » refuses her like the others. Suddenly there is no more « social distancing » – I find myself side by side with Stella Morris in front of the door, only 30 centimetres between us. I can see her up close, whereas in September at the Old Bailey I certainly noticed her in her red dress chatting happily with Jennifer Robinson in the bays of room 10 before Assange’s arrival on September 9th, but there were still 20 metres between us. Now that I am so close to her, I realize that she is different from the « Stella Morris » who was in Westminster Court on December 19-20, 2019, January 23 and February 19, 2020. Certainly, since the hearing of July 28, 2020, Stella Morris has always worn a big black or red mask that prevents me from distinguishing the bottom of her face. But her height is not deceiving: the woman I saw here from December 2019 to February 2020 and at the Woolwich Court in the last week of February was very small, less than 1.55 cm. This person is at least 1.60 cm tall because the top of her skull is at my eye level and I am 1.67 centimetres tall. She has a more massive face, a more square jaw, thicker lips and her complexion is marked by scars on her right temple that are visible despite the make-up. The woman I met as Stella Morris in the winter of 2019/2020 had a sharper chin, an oval face, a flawless clear complexion with a few freckles. She looked like two sisters, the one in front of me older than the previous one. I am confused, but I also noticed that « Stella Morris » from the previous winter had rounder shoulders and a more opulent chest… She often wore white outfits whereas the Stella Morris after April 11th often wore dark red outfits, today she wears a brown suit and a burgundy turtleneck jumper. I saw her for hours at the Woolwich Court. Of course, I didn’t pay much attention to it, as there was no question at the time that she was Assange’s fiancée, but the few stolen photos published here and there still give me evidence that it may not be the same person.

Nor do I forget that Assange did not pay much attention to « Stella Morris » at the Woolwich Court, even if sometimes he slipped her little papers which she was responsible for passing on two rows further on, as at school, to Fitzgerald or Summers.

In front of me she looks tough and determined. The « Stella Morris » (or Moris, or Gonzalez Devant, or Smith Robertson…) of the previous winter was not very talkative, refusing to answer any of our questions, she never smiled either, but her impassive face expressed indifference rather than hostility.

During our 10-minute face-to-face, Kristinn Hrafnsson tried to talk to the manager but her voice was barely audible. The trio waits, therefore, machine-gunned by the photographers until a young woman, Florence Iveson or Gareth Peirce’s assistant, wearing a green mask that hides her identity well, discusses with « Anushi » and ends up making them enter by the second door. I see Stella Morris taking off her brown jacket (she doesn’t wear a coat or a bag as usual, as if she had just come out of a nearby flat or had left all her things in a car…) and going through the security gate.  I decide to persevere, a place can always become available… But now the male MET policemen are replaced by much less friendly female cops. The female policemen shout dispersal orders to me to the 5 female activists who are still waiting behind me. From what I understand, as in France the police believe that the covid gives them the right to suspend freedom of assembly and movement. According to the « covid measures », we shouldn’t even leave our homes. The policewomen push us towards the wall, they make threats against us. A tall blonde woman targets me, I ask her not to touch me because the covid requires « social distancing » and she is ready to grab me. I duck, I step back, then I come back to the door. The cops push us back towards the journalists’ equipment, as if they were ensuring the safety of an important personality who should not be disturbed. They are much more there for this reason than to keep order on the roads, because we activists are far less numerous than journalists and perfectly peaceful. The tone is rising between some British activists and the police, with the right to freedom of movement and freedom of expression openly clashing with the « new » and illegal world of « covid measures » .

I admit that I will not enter. If Assange is present in room 1, the meeting has begun and will not last long. A little before 10 o’clock photographers had run to the entrance of the Seymour Place in the hope of taking a picture of Assange, but they had come back empty-handed. It is possible that Julian Assange had been brought to this place long before we arrived or by some other means than the entrance of the prisoner vans. I am forced to organise myself in order to act if Julian Assange comes out and gives a speech in front of those dozens of microphones pointed at the door. I have to give him our message on the sign « SOS received » and our contact details. To be politically visible, I have brought a French flag and my Yellow Vest, which I don’t dare to wave but I hold them in my hand. The blonde cop still targets me. I move back to get out of her reach and sit on the floor next to a young journalist who is ready to go on a photo hunt. She is a freelance, I tell her all the events of Wikijustice’s struggle for the liberation of Julian Assange. She is interested and takes our contact details. She has heard about the importance of the Yellow Vests movement coming here in October 2019 and at the Woolwich Court in February 2020 and she is concerned about the political situation in our country, the increasingly violent covid dictatorship. If human rights fall to the countries of Human Rights, it is a very bad sign for the whole world.

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[1] Land Register of the 179 at 185 Marylebone Road – the owner is the compagny Prudential renting rooms to the Westminster Magistrate Court

Special police ensuring the protection of personalities?

So we are waiting in the cold under the watchful eye of the cops. At 10.45 am I can see Greekemmy in the glass window on the first floor. She sends messages on her phone. Immediately the activists who had taken refuge behind the journalists to escape from the police start shouting « Free Assange ». I understand that Julian Assange won’t come out. It’s not even worth waiting here any longer. As soon as the refusal of release is pronounced, the captive is usually evacuated quickly. I share my analysis with my neighbour, I stay the time to get confirmation of the bad news and I decide to post myself with my sign, flag and Yellow Vest at the exit of the vans. At least 30 journalists have already done so and they occupy the pavement of Seymour Street place on the left side of the building. But they can’t get close to the carriage entrance because another police force is blocking the access: no less than 6 cars and police buses are parked along the pavement, including a large truck of the MET Territorial Support Group. These policemen all in black look even tougher, but more professional than the women of the MET. They spread out in a cordon in the street, turn the cars around and politely but firmly order us to stay on the opposite pavement. Their uniforms and weapons look worn out, it’s not fake this time. They are real personality protection policemen, exactly like those armed with machine guns guarding Kensington Palace, this Palace so gloomy that one wonders if these policemen don’t keep prisoners inside rather than protecting the palace from the dangers of the outside.

My wait for the vehicle that is supposed to take Assange back to « prison » will last more than two hours. The demonstration continues on Marylebone Avenue, two activists are stopped by the MET police officers who double the cordon of the Territorial Support Group. They were taken to the entrance of the residential building next to the Westminster, possibly a staff accommodation as it belongs to the court complex. The arrested women shout, but it doesn’t sound very bad, a few minutes later I see them joking with the police. Staged or real? I don’t know. The journalists are more and more numerous in this street, losing interest in Stella Morris who makes a short statement in front of an increasingly sparse crowd. On the film that my waiting neighbour will show me, she looks discomfited, she obviously had high expectations that a project that was important to her became a failure.

Something is still going on, however, because Assange is still not coming out. Negotiations in high places with important people? The scale of the new police apparatus in these places strongly suggests so. These policemen guarding the Queen did not come to contain us or to enforce the so-called « covid rules ». Yesterday there were no covid rules, no policemen and a crowd in the court. Today the police came to protect those who are negotiating. Indeed no car leaves the Westminster Prudential for 2 hours. I can’t take it anymore as I am so cold and exhausted. In two hours there is only one movement: a small van of the utility type enters the building, the big door rises and in the depths of the Westminster we can see two vehicles, the one on the right parked deeper than the one on the left. The car comes out a few minutes later, without anyone being able to see who is sitting in it, but the journalists don’t move, it is unlikely to be Julian Assange.

Shortly before 1 p.m. the police officers of the Support Territorial Group leave the place. I see their leader communicating with an officer of the MET who is in charge of the system. She is holding a rigid support with a document placed on it, as if she was scripting a film. When the black van of the real policemen leaves, the cord of policewomen who had nasalized us before moves around the carriage door taking over from the men in black. The Support Territorial Group did not indeed include any women.

Suddenly at 1.20 pm the carriage gate rises and a prisoner’s van leaves. It is the rush of journalists on the vehicle which turns right towards Marylebone Road. It has two small windows: I also rush out and put my paper on one of them, in the hope that Assange sees our message, as I did here on 20 December 2019 and 13 January 2020. At that time the 5 policemen present were only here, in their own words, to prevent us from entering the basement. But now, as soon as I had the time to make this gesture, the aggressive blonde cop rush on me, grab me and pull me back. She yells in my ear « you broke the covid rules, you’re gonna be arrested« . I’m a foreigner, but I know that English policemen don’t have the right to stop people in the street as easily as in France. There is no national police force in England in fact, but a multitude of local police forces. The MET is only the London City Police, and even the famous Scotland Yard is not a government institution. It cannot control people’s identities and can only act in cases of flagrante delicto or « reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed »[1]. It is because the government does not have the means to enforce the masking and travel ban obligations that masking is not imposed on the street and that all the ‘covid rules’ are really only ‘recommendations’, unlike the French police and its terror fines.

I am shaken by the violence of this person, while another policewoman, more sympathetic, shouts at me « It wasn’t him in the car »!  So I come back, I approach them to talk to them. I explain that I haven’t done anything wrong, that I didn’t want to stop the car but to send a message, that Assange is legally free and should have the right to communicate, that it’s not normal for human rights associations to be persona non grata in such a trial, that democracy is in danger... The two other women look at me, I hope they are smiling behind their masks, especially as I’ve taken off mine to show them that I’m not hostile to them. The aggressive blonde continues to grumble about something I don’t understand, still stuck on her ‘covid rules’. Because of the mask, without seeing the expression on the faces, without understanding and being understood, I lose a lot of my diplomatic efficiency.

I am forced to walk away under threat, I had already put my French flag and my Yellow Vest back in my bag. I am so fed up with it that I decide to leave, for the first time in my entire militant journey for Assange, without having waited until the end. Behind the block only one small arab café is open: we meet there among militants to finally drink a coffee, some of us manage to convince the owner to warm up inside. It is so inhuman to stand outside in the freezing cold for 8 hours. I take my coffee, come back to the door and sit on the floor as I have been doing in Paris since September, since I no longer have a choice and our lives oscillate between that of tramps and beasts of burden who go to work and return to the stable in the evening under police escort. How can we help Assange when we ourselves must now fight to remain free?

What a spectacular deterioration in the state of human rights in Europe in just one year!

It is finally 1.35 pm when the final act takes place. The door rises, we see all the security agents, including « Anushi », who worked on the event, gathered on the threshold of the garage. They are escorting the large white vehicle was at the far end of the building, which is moving towards the exit. It is not a prisoner’s van, so the journalists do not pay attention to it. Just as the vehicle is about to turn into the street, the private security guards hand over responsibility to the Metropolitan Police, who form a protective cordon around it. So I see that it’s a big white minibus with 30 seats, with no Serco or other prison-related signs. It looks like a government vehicle carrying VIPs. Moreover, it is equipped with a discreet flashing light with a blue light that goes on and off. The windows of the minibus are tinted, as is the passenger door so that it is impossible to see the interior or the driver’s face. It is very likely that Julian Assange is there with important members of staff, negotiators, organisers… chiefs. As the minibus turns left, direction Hyde Park, Kensington, royal quarters, I find myself alone in front of him. I brandish my sign, I raise my fist. If Assange is there, he has seen me.

The minibus starts slowly, then turns right again towards Baywaters and Kensington. The journalists chase him down, they finally figured out that Assange is in it, but it’s too late. The building is empty. The MET policemen put their things in the 2 remaining cars and leave. The door is closed and the security guards leave through the office entrance on the other side. I am so tired and cold that I quickly greet the young freelance journalist and leave to take refuge in my hotel.  I didn’t see him, it was impossible, but if he saw me, so I didn’t do all this for nothing.

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[1] https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/st-s/stop-and-search/your-rights-and-responsibilities/

Monika Karbowska

Dieppe the muzzled versus Brighton the rebel – trip to England on 2 January 2021

At a time of global lying, the media and governments make us believe that it is forbidden to travel. But this is not true. So I left for England on January 2nd, first going to Dieppe and from there with the ferry across the Channel.

My journey began at the Saint Lazare station on January 1st in a strange atmosphere that reminds me of the science fiction film « Brazil »: 2 different police forces are walking around the station looking for some non masked persons, Vigipirate soldiers are marching around in commando, jumping around as if behind each lethargic traveller under his mask an armed terrorist would come out, 2 private security companies share the market of the mask control, and the SCNF-train- employees are wearing brand new outfits and always make you understand that the mask is more important than the train ticket.

The train is a place where you learn the discipline of the mask, not a means of public transport. Every five minutes a loudspeaker spits out a hysterical voice of guilt-ridden commands: « all responsible against coronavirus, download the government application all anti-covid »! I swap with a waitress at the only Starbucks « café » open – normal cafés being banned by the government, the American multinationals logically take over the whole market. She is hidden behind a glass window, yet she is alone in a vast empty room. I don’t understand what she is saying and when I finish my coffee purchase I ask her if she can’t lower her mask so that I can understand her words. The company should at least allow her to do that… She sighs and tells me that between colleagues we stop the mask bullshit but that she fears the kapo customers.

She’s right, because very quickly I get the wrath of a toilet attendant when I take off my mask in the toilet to breathe, look in the mirror and wash my face. Yet another one who thinks she is a little boss thanks to Covid and who doesn’t know that the kapos were always the last ones to be shot by the Nazis after loading all the victims on the trains to the camps. I am thinking of 1 January 1941 when the French had not yet all understood what had happened to them. The atmosphere must have been a bit like the one I’m experiencing here on 1 January 2021. The Paris-Rouen train is nevertheless still quite quiet, I can sleep under the « abaya » veil from which I can remove the mask. The ticket inspector only passes by once and of course you have to wear the muzzle so that he can control it properly. It’s much worse on the Rouen Dieppe train: several controllers in a group go through the trains 10, 20 times in search of the « criminal without a mask ». I wonder why this train line is so full of kapo railway workers. Already in July I had my first surreal conversation with a ticket inspector who spent her time tracking the no masked « criminal » throughout the train. I was alone in the whole car and when she said to me « I obey orders » I replied « remember the SCNF- train employees who said that during the purification trials. To what limits are you willing to obey? She didn’t know how to answer, visibly unaware of all this part of our European history and the psychological mechanisms that have plunged people into the vicious circle of submission.

But the worst thing is that it was the RATP and SNCF trade unions who were the first to demand the mask in public transport, from 11 May 2020, on employees and passengers, and opened the door for the government to impose it everywhere, in all weathers, in all places and for everyone. We will not regain our freedom to breathe until these trade unionists understand the anti-human muzzle imposed on workers 15 hours a day is the first step towards the restoration of serfdom. Unless it wasn’t a mistake? I remember this last political rally « before the war » to which a friend of mine, a Yellow Vest from Paris, now converted to covidianism, took me. It was on 10 March 2020 at the Parole Errante in Montreuil. 5000 trade unionists and users of the RATP and the SNCF celebrated happily and determinedly the victory in the Great Strike to save the pensions that we all held against Macron during the hard winter months. I attended the event, I listened to the vibrant revolutionary speeches of young trade union activists who sang a moving International at the end[1].

https://www.facebook.com/RevolutionPermanente.fr/videos/430499884409927

Less than a week later all these fine spirits were wisely confined, obeying Macron’s order to immediately cease all political, cultural and social associative activity. Since then, we no longer have freedom of assembly and association. How could such a reversal come about? What if the trade unionists of the SNCF and the RATP didn’t win the pension strike but simply negotiated their adhesion to the corona regime in exchange for their special regime? Betraying us all? The answer to the question would explain to us the mechanism of servile submission of the SNCF and RATP agents to all the delusions of covido-dictatorship. Moreover, I remember that three weeks later the friend who took me to the meeting explained to me that she had had the covid in December 2019 and that she had already read all about the virus in Chinese scientific documents from that time on, that it was very serious and highly contagious and that we were all going to die from cytokine storms that were impossible to prevent, treat and cure. But then, she knew on March 10, 2020 that the contamination would be massive at this meeting of several thousand people gathered together and she took me there anyway? She knew and she didn’t tell me anything? What should we think of her attitude and that of those trade unionists who have disappeared from social and political life since then?

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[1] https://www.facebook.com/CoordRATPSNCF/posts/141151180777677

https://www.facebook.com/RevolutionPermanente.fr/videos/430499884409927/

Crossing the sea in January 2021 – The English coast in struggle against covid-dictatorship

In Dieppe I find the hotel where I stayed during the summer. The owner has lowered the price by a third but we are only 3 guests in this beautiful establishment in an old house near the port. She remembers me and trust is built up as the day goes by. She understood that she was fooled by Macron’s policy because she had scrupulously followed the « barrier gestures » and imposed hygienic-masked delirium on all these summer customers. Macron closed the hotels and forbade her to work, thus destroying the tourism that towns like Dieppe live on. But it’s not just the hygienic terror in the hotels that drives away the customers: I discover with displeasure that masks are compulsory in the whole city of Dieppe and in the whole region. It is also imposed on the vast pebble beach and submission from all is the order of the day. I came to oxygenate my lungs, as in July, and I am subject to the same prison regime as in Ile de France. Who will come to pay for a hotel in a provincial town to breathe in the stale air from his mask?

 I break down and shout my anger at the deserted sea. But in Dieppe people stare at me with a nasty look when I wander on the beach without a mask. The air is literally unbreathable. So I decide to cross the Channel with the ferry the very next day, even though I had planned a few days of holiday here. When I call the hotel manager from the boat to explain to her why I’ve shortened my stay, she’s not surprised. She knows that the mask has never been taxed out in England and she laments the English tourists who will not be coming back when they were an important source of income for the town. If they came back, they would immediately be subjected to a forced PCR test at the town’s university hospital without being able to leave the boat, as happened to about thirty English tourists who had disembarked just before New Year’s Eve, a Dieppois informed me. I had a long discussion with this man concerned about the death of his town. He already knows three restaurateurs in the region who have committed suicide and nobody talks about it. One of his relatives works in the EPADHs in the region and she also has a lot to say about the active and passive euthanasia that is taking place there.

At the Dieppe ferry terminal, DFDS has a monopoly on the crossing to New Heaven. The ticket costs only 30 Euros and unlike in Dover it is possible to board the boat without a vehicle. We are some 30 travellers, elderly British couples returning home from their holidays in France before the Franco-British conflict over the pseudo « English variant » of the corona. There are also some young French people who are emigrating for good. The mask is strictly compulsory throughout the passenger and cargo port area. The port is moreover framed by imposing barbed wire under the cliff. I tell myself that the regime was allowed to install this barbed wire against the migrants who were going to England. But in the end, the security measures turned against us, French citizens. If we have to flee our dictatorship, we will no longer be able to get into a boat and cross the sea like the fishermen from the Island Sein who joined de Gaulle in the summer of 1940. We are prisoners of our own country and its regime.

The DFDS ticket office agrees to sell me a ticket but requires me to provide a sworn statement « I, the undersigned, declare that I have no symptoms of covid ». This is illegal of course, no private company has the right to inspect a citizen’s medical file. The personal data of travellers must be declared to the CNIL (National Council of Dataprotection) if DFDS collects them from now on. I ask the young employee under which law the company stores this personal data and whether it has declared it to the CNIL. The young person doesn’t even know what I’m talking about, she has never heard of the CNIL and obeys the orders given without a murmur. I don’t want to put my crossing in danger by protesting too much but I ask her for a photocopy of the sheet signed and stamped by the company attesting that I have indeed filed this declaration. « You understand, if I give you this attestation, how can I prove what is on it if I don’t have it anymore, in case of a problem? I have to cover myself as well ». The young employee doesn’t understand anything but her superior does: she provides me with the stamped photocopy.

The entrance to the boat is gloomy, but afterwards I enjoy my crossing. The green-blue sea on which a few rays of sunshine rise after the rain. It is cold on the highest deck. But I am alone and I BREATH a beautiful iodised air. What a joy to breathe, it is a primary freedom. Besides, we are privileged because we have the right to go to the ferry’s restaurant, eat and contemplate the landscape without a mask. What a joy to be oneself, to find a normal life again. Disembarkation takes place around 2 pm. New Heaven is a small industrial port nestled between the cliffs of the rather urbanised coast of Sussex. The ferry terminal is very small, we go down to the garage and the English employees of DFDS pick us up as we leave the boat, escort us on foot to a small hangar where we pass the British border control and pick up our luggage. I’m a bit nervous because the employee is so overzealous. She asks for my ‘Passanger Locator Card’ and asks if I am going to London. Yes, to meet my ‘friend’. Partner, boyfriend, friend… English allows you to stay in a diplomatic limbo. She doesn’t insist and lets me pass. As soon as I leave the building I tear off my mask. What a joy to be free. The port employees don’t wear it at all when they work outside.

This is the case for the whole region. Apart from public transport, which is more severe, the mask is not worn on the southern coast. It is not imposed outside and everyone breathes freely on the beaches, on the coastal promenade, in the streets. Restaurants are closed and only do take-away sales, but many people work and in many places employees do not even wear masks indoors. Moreover, the region is a strong wind against the covid dictatorship and it is making this known through this practical and stubborn resistance. I talk to hoteliers and restaurateurs who explain to me their refusal to die from the government’s madness. I know that the English government is not united on the issue and that it is more the NHA that imposes these absurd bans that are contrary to fundamental rights. The coast from Eastbourne to Portsmouth is urbanised and touristy, dotted with housing estates, but also with pretty Victorian town centres and pretty little houses renovated by the middle classes. Owners of three-star hotels look like they are enjoying the closing of their businesses, but this is not the case for small room renters or owners of cheap hotels and pubs. They open to survive in this incomprehensible madness. This Sunday, January 3, the inhabitants and tourists are strolling with their families on the beach and on the coastal promenade, having coffee and meals on the benches, running and cycling. Of course, there are no packhorses.

Brighton City Council has put up posters advising the elderly not to wear masks. The poster says: ‘Understand me, I cant wear the mask’ next to a picture of an old lady. « Understand me, I cant wear the mask ». The slogan remains within the framework of Covidian ideology: one must wear the mask to protect others. But the mayor of Brighton is asking for mercy for the elderly, let them breathe! He is right. I think of those poor shadows in my suburbs or in Dieppe who can barely manage to drag their mouths and noses blocked by Chinese plastic, merchants with their heads down like damned souls. Great Britain breathes and the fresh air strengthens its determination to live life to the full. This air is contagious and I too experience some moments of pure happiness.

Greece for Assange

On the evening of 2 January I am pleased to speak at the debate of the Greece for Assange[1] collective invited by a Greek activist friend Anastasia Politi via the Jitsi Meet application. Of course, having experienced the Social Forums where 100 000 European activists met in Paris in 2003, London in 2004, Athens in 2006, Malmö in 2008 and Istanbul in 2010, having organised this kind of big event, I always find virtual « debates » very disappointing and moreover energetically exhausting whereas a real public meeting is a meeting that feeds me. But today I am grateful to my Greek friends for coming to take part in the struggle for the liberation of Julian Assange. I am happy to see even in video the great militants of the Greek left, Sissi Vovou and Afroditi Stambouli. Above all, I am very grateful for the support given to our actions for the liberation of Julian Assange by my friend, the former MEP Konstantina Kuneva, whom I have known since 2008, during our joint trade union struggles for the rights of Eastern European migrant workers in Greece. I am all the more pleased that these well-known activists in Greece are also historical pillars of the feminist movement. Julian Assange was held captive by the British political-judicial system on the basis of manipulations using a feminist veneer; it is only fair that it should be European feminists who achieve his release. I am very happy to be back in the familiar atmosphere of Greek left activism that I experienced from 2005 to 2017 when I was part of the anti-globalisation movement and the struggles against the odious debt imposed on Greece.

I hear from the activist Niki Konstantinidi (whose face I don’t see, another of the peculiarities of « democracy on the internet, that you can hear a debate without being seen) the assurance that Julian Assange would be cold « in Belmarsh », that he would « lack warm clothes » and that it would be « impossible to get to the Old Bailey on 4 January ». This person seems to know Assange and the lawyers’ entourage very well, but his assertions annoy me nonetheless: if Assange is in Belmarsh, his alleged relatives can simply use the money from the kitty to buy him what he needs at the prison shop. Belmarsh is not Tazmamart or Cayenne, I refuse to play this game of dramatization. Or Assange is not in Belmarsh, but in a special place, dependent only on the royal system and not on the British Ministry of Justice and then the truth comes out. People are tired of infantile storytelling and want to hear the truth about everything: the covid, the Grand Reset, the geopolitical situation, the election fraud in North America and also who and where Julian Assange is.

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[1] https://www.facebook.com/groups/515096986022028

https://www.facebook.com/groups/515096986022028/permalink/761277734737284

https://meet.jit.si/securefreespeechsecureourfreedom?fbclid=IwAR0rHxo9smrEhSkN7Dw8V1ZBtW06Voo6swHM7vLYFycPEaq12FPRciQAd50

The City the day before Julian Assange’s trial

I arrive in the City of London Corporation, known as the City of London, on the evening of January 3, 2021. It is Sunday and I am not surprised that the area is deserted. I will be more surprised the next day Monday in front of the empty offices, the shops closed for « covid rules » as if a bomb had decimated the living, keeping only the buildings: the multinationals have finally imposed telework to everyone and can make money by abandoning the offices that are no longer needed. It is the employee who now pays with HIS own rent the company office expenses! What a boon to make such savings! Long live the Covid, must say the top managers of American Bank, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, London Stock Exchange, City Stock Exchange, who surround the Old Bailey Court.

 This is not the case for the owners of the small businesses that sold services to employees: clothing shops, kiosks, bookshops, cafés, pubs, restaurants are already bankrupt and for sale. I managed to book a hotel 500 metres from the Old Bailey. It is a typical manager’s hotel with ultra modern comfort but minimalist decor and furniture. Normally I would never have been able to pay for a room there, but the price is modest given the location. With the Covid dictatorship, panic and telecommuting, we are only 3 guests in the whole hotel. The rules at the reception desk are much stricter than on the rebellious coast: my passport is scanned and I am asked to sign a declaration that I only travel for the reasons the government has deemed valid. On the sheet of paper that the receptionist gives me, there is « the funeral of a loved one and accompanying a loved one to a funeral », « illness » and « support for a sick relative »: gloomy atmosphere. There is, however, a small line « imperative stay for a work meeting that cannot be conducted remotely ».

I act as if nothing had happened and there was no covid. On the third day, the employees will finally drop their masks, the naturalness of life fortunately returns.

As soon as I arrived I had to start looking for something to eat, I realised that with the « covid rules » the few restaurants have no customers and therefore no reason to stay open in the evening. I walk towards the Old Bailey via Luton Street, walk along the historic St Sepulchre Church and find myself in front of the imposing 19th century building and its extension, the 1960s bunker where I spent hours waiting in September. Around them the empty office buildings with their huge doors opening onto deep delivery basements are sinister. Only the security guards are on duty in the halls and I know that at the slightest suspicious sign they will immediately call the City of London Corporation Police, which was not at all convenient in September. So I can’t take any photographs.

However, what I see of the Old Bailey is very interesting: the « ceremony » of the « trial » is already in preparation because the whole ground floor of the old building, a large room on the first floor on the left side and two windows on the top floor are illuminated. In the 1960s bunker where the September meetings were held and where I could see Assange physically present, two large bay windows are illuminated on the ground floor as well as a large courtroom on the first and second floors, perhaps room 10 where it took place in September. On the top floor two small windows stand out with their bluish lights: the public galleries are up there, but I don’t remember any blue light. What is interesting is that even the large carriage entrance that opens onto a small courtyard through which the court employees enter is illuminated. Does this mean that even the employees are mobilised for the preparation of the « ceremony »? I am very much afraid that what will happen tomorrow will be an « execution ».

I bypass the Old Bailey complex via Warwick Lane, the street that separates the court from the Sankt Paul Cathedral complex surrounded by new and ugly bank buildings. The only open shop in the area is near the Sankt Paul underground station. I can finally buy dinner.

Night waiting for the verdict at the Old Bailey

I would have liked to go back at night near the Old Bailey to keep an eye on those who bring Assange to the Old Bailey. The experience of September showed that he was by no means brought there every morning, but most likely he was already living in the Old Bailey before the trial and stayed there all September because this huge bunker has all the necessary infrastructure. After all, before 1902, the place was the sinister, thousand-year-old New Gate prison, well equipped with dungeons that only need to be modernised[1]. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes in the flesh in room 10 on September 9, 2020, I might even have doubted its real presence in this place. But I did see him. Who, then, and in what way brings the illustrious hostage to these gloomy rooms where his fate will be revealed to us? To answer this question would be to have a clue where Julian Assange really is, once it is understood that he cannot be in the ordinary Thameside prison known as « Belmarsh ». The prisoners of Belmarsh are common law convicts by the British Ministry of Justice and all benefit from the same regime, letters, e-mail, the possibility of visits and the sending of money.

As for the Covid in Belmarsh, it is hardly the storytellers of the Assange case who ring the bell, the real prisoners and their lawyers are not at all panic-stricken, as I was able to see from discussions with my Polish contacts (a Polish consul takes care of the many Poles serving sentences in Belmarsh).

But I can’t bring myself to siege the Old Bailey at night, I’m too tired and I’m alone. Nevertheless, the night is still deep when I get up and go out at 5.30 am to go to Court. I am well equipped to keep out the cold and I have taken my breakfast with me.

I arrive quickly at 5.45 am in front of the dark and deserted building. I inspect the premises, no one, no activists set up for the night in the Warwick Passage, the narrow gut on the south side of the Court where we spent hours in September waiting in front of the entrance to the public galleries.

I walk towards the North part of the building at New Gate Street but I hesitate to waste precious time because someone may take my first place in front of the public gallery…How do I know which entrance will be used this time? I can’t know, alone in front of the multiple entrances to the Old Bailey it is impossible for me to organize myself better.

There is not a cat in front of the whole block, I come back to the Warwick passage. Before standing in front of the heavy wooden door of the Warwick Passage, I first go to see the bank security guard across the street who is staring at me in the entrance of his building. I already know how prompt the City’s security guards are in calling the City of London Corporation police at the slightest « anomaly ». For them, a woman alone at night waiting outside a court door that opens at 9 o’clock is an anomaly. The man is young, he is wearing a mask and I don’t think he is smiling at me, but I am smiling. I introduce myself and explain that I represent a human rights association and that I come as an « observer » for the trial of Julian Assange. I warn him so that he understands what I’m doing here so early. He nods. Then I inspect the two large billboards under glass next to the main entrance of the bunker: there will be 25 criminal hearings in the courtyard today.  The names of the people involved are posted, the case number and, importantly, the names of the judges.

No Julian Assange on the Old Bailey list, no Judge Baraitser, Vanessa or other. Assange’s trial is therefore not being conducted by the Central Criminal Court but by another « entity » in a room rented or lent for the occasion. Further proof that this trial is not a real trial.

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[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_de_Newgate

https://www.alamyimages.fr/photos-images/newgate-prison-london.html

www.victorianweb.org/art/architecture/london/63.html

Memories of the hearing of 11 December 2020

Standing in the freezing cold that sweeps the Warwick Passage, I have plenty of time to reflect on my adventures of December 11th, the last hearing in what was a pleasant trip to an England far freer than France under curfew and police incarceration at home on health grounds.

I had arrived early at the Westminster Magistrate Court I was also the first one there and it was another hour before the Greekemmys supporters arrived. The second person to turn up was Sabine von Törne for whom I have sympathy. We discussed the situation in Assange and in our respective countries at length while we were waiting. There were about 7 people behind me and Greekemmy always handed out the numbers, but respectfully noted me as « first ».

The day then dawns around 8.30am and soon everything is in place: the new security agents are at the security gates, our French speaking friend from Mauritius is also there. We greet each other and I quickly go through the gates, I run to the board in the hall, no list. I rush upstairs without looking behind me and I ask the secretariat. The young secretary leaves to find out more: Assange, it will be room 3 or room 10. I arrive in front of room 3, a secretary posts the list shortly afterwards. It will be fine here: Julian Paul Assange, 10 o’clock. But no judge’s no, as always. The list has 16 names, 10 in the morning and 10 in the evening plus Assange. Three are Polish, one Hungarian, 4 Romanians, 1 Estonian, 1 Irish… But I quickly notice that the bulk of the Eastern European extradited persons are sent to room 10 on the second floor. From here you can see the crowd amassing on the second floor: lawyers and families. So they decided to separate Assange from the other litigants. There are only 8 of us queuing in front of room 3: behind me Sabine, Deepa, Greekemmy, soon Rebecca Vincent still in her black mask and red coat, and then two journalists including Mohamed El Maazi from Sputnik UK and Joseph who this time is queuing with them with a press card.

At 9.50 am everything goes wrong. A big clerk, different from those we are used to, leaves the room and asks who is coming for Julian Assange’s audience. I am confident, I introduce myself. But the man doesn’t calculate me, talks over my head to the others, as if I didn’t exist. Deepa River presents itself as a « legal observer » on behalf of an organisation. I’m upset because I don’t really understand what people are saying with the mask. I need to see lips and facial expressions to understand a foreign language. Also, as the man does not understand me either, I have to take my mask off to be understood. But the man says that because of the « Covid » there will only be two seats for the public, including journalists, especially since the observers from the High Commission are expected. What about the High Commission? Envoys from the Australian High Governorate? Is Australia moving and recognising Assange as its citizen?

We are stunned. I protest, saying that I have been here since 6 a.m. Deepa protests, so does Rebecca. The journalists at least ask to speak to the judge because it is « inconceivable » that the press should be excluded from justice! In the meantime, I have documented the various scandalous trials from the time of Queen Victoria, including that of Oscar Wilde, which marked the struggle for freedom of expression and creative freedom[1]. In fact, the public and journalists were present in large crowds during the trials of the 19th century and did not hesitate to come! Democracy was much more alive at that time than in our oligarchic-technological century where you have to fight to get ONE WITNESS to the court!

The unpleasant clerk declares that he will « ask the manager » if more places can be granted (the corona is a perfect tool of dictatorship!). He shuttles back and forth several times between room 3 and the secretariat. Then Edward Hamilton Fitzgerald arrives and greets us with an air that I find condescending. The clerk brings in two tall redheads, who introduce themselves as being from the « High Commission », i.e. diplomatic representatives from one member country of the Commonwealth to another. Australians? Possibly, but how do we know, these men are not even looking at us[2].

The clerk then turns to us and asks who we are. I am standing in my ‘first place’ and Deepa River and Rebecca Vincent are behind my back. I give my name and my organisation and I offer Wikijustice documents as evidence. The man does not want them. Deepa and Rebecca are also each trying to ‘sell’ their organisation. I’m afraid that he is about to say « it’s not going to be possible ». But suddenly he turns to Sabine who is standing back. Who are you people? She answers « personal friend of Julian Assange ». The clerk takes Sabine to Fitzgerald a few metres further on. He comes back… and opens the door to Sabine who happens to be the only one who can go in to see Assange.

Deepa is stunned. « How? Just say you’re Assange’s girlfriend and they open all the doors for you » ? I smile. I would have liked to remind her that she is now a victim of the system that she helped set up so well: people who don’t know each other arrive, claiming to be « Assange’s family » and without having to show any proof, no ID, no marriage or cohabitation certificate, or whatever, suddenly have all the privileges. Stella Morris has been doing exactly that since last July and it had never bothered Deepa. El Maazi is invited to enter and as I find myself behind him, I follow him. So much the worse if I’m fired. But the clerk doesn’t say anything more, Deepa and Rebecca follow me and there are 3 of us in the public box! Sabine is sitting in the back, 11 out of 13 seats are condemned, Deepa ends up sitting in the courtroom and nobody says anything to her as if the management of the show had given up and decided not to keep any of the rules that are supposedly so restrictive and indispensable. The video is already turned on, we can see a room but different from the red chairs that we were presented with for 1 year as being those of Belmarsh and resembling a medical centre waiting room.

Julian Assange is not there. However, the judge is already here and he is a young man with red hair. The alleged court hearing is reduced to an expeditious organizational meeting. Fitzgerald is standing and talking with the prosecutor, also a young redhead. He does not even sit down when the judge says « Judge Baraitser has granted » that Mr. Assange will not be obliged to appear because he is represented. Has granted? What does that mean? How can she guarantee that he is not obliged to appear and that we can talk behind his back? Did she promise HIM? Is he the one who doesn’t want to appear? Otherwise WHO has decided in his place that we will not see him and therefore it will be impossible to see what his health and general condition is? Is he still alive? After all, we haven’t seen him alive since September…

Hamilton Fitzgerald says something I don’t understand but it doesn’t sound solemn. And here the judge says it’s « postponed until January 4th in the Criminal Court ». Everybody gets up and leaves without waiting for the judge. I am more and more annoyed by this « fake justice ». I get out of the box and walk towards the judge. The judge asks me to step aside. I do so, but I tell him that I haven’t heard or understood what’s going on. I introduce myself and Wikijustice and I ask him if I can know his name. He introduces himself (well, it is not a luxury in a democracy to know the names of the judges who decide on the lives of citizens!): Paul Goldspring. Thank you. We leave the court together, Sabine and Rebecca Vincent in red coat and me in my purple suit. Outside the demonstration continues. I am disappointed but not so surprised. They don’t want to show it to us, we don’t know why. I don’t think it’s them who refused to show it, but rather that they can’t afford to stage the ‘Belmarsh staging’ as before and that’s why the Westminster-style ceremony is reduced to the bare essentials. In 3 weeks time it will be the ceremony at the Old Bailey. I don’t know where Assange will spend Christmas, but what is certain is that he will be at the Old Bailey before Monday 4th January.

That same evening I am leaving to Islington to inspect Lisa Baraitser’s Pure Theater. I am having a great time in the open pubs and restaurants, full of life and joy.

Judge Paul Golspring is my age. He is quoted as having had to judge an apprentice terrorist who asked to have a telephone in his cell[3] . But he was especially known in 2017 for having decided to extradite two Poles, the Herba brothers, whom Italy accused of kidnapping a young female model. The Herba brothers had not committed any crime and sought to explain themselves to the Italian justice system by video. They claimed that they themselves had taken the young Chloe Ayling to the British embassy[4]. Their lawyer claimed that the case was an invention organised by the model’s agent in order to obtain notoriety, which is not without recalling certain Swedish accusations against Assange… Judge Goldspring found himself in the difficult situation of judging the real lives of two real men on the sole basis of « storytelling » provided by the media… This also recalls the role of storyteller in Julian Assange’s life. Where is the truth? Where is the fable? How can the truth be proven when a judge magistrate is only a simple citizen mediator who is invested with so much power without having the means to carry out his mission with justice and honesty?

How can we believe that Judge Baraitser really decided Julian Assange’s life when she is not a professional judge and when it is obviously the political powers that have decided and are deciding Assange’s fate (Crown, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Defence, Home Office, Foreign Office, various foundations including those that pay media storytellers… analysed the International Wikijustice Complaint)[5].

A court is not a theatre for which the media write the script. Historically no, but maybe in the 21st century we are moving towards such a life, such a society? Too many things have changed in our lives in the last year. We have lost total control of our lives, our power as citizens is already well eroded. We must resist and fight if you want to recover this citizen power and refuse the condition of cattle locked up at night and only coming out during the day to be exploited for labour. Yes, we must REFUSE this servile condition with all our might.

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[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_commissioner

[3] https://www.euroweeklynews.com/2019/12/03/english-news-second-terrorist-back-behind-bars-as-police-review-license-conditions/

[4]  https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41445444

https://www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/15556500.alleged-kidnapping-of-coulsdon-model-could-be-a-sham-claims-a-lawyer/

[5] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rCPKk9vdY29H_kaHjqeClvJtQ62_cw7W/view

Julian Assange on 4 January at the Old Bailey, life saved but captive and in danger of psychiatrisation

An hour goes by while I wait in the icy windy Warwick Passage. From 6.15 a.m. a multitude of cameras are installed in front of the central door of the bunker of the Criminal Court, an expensive and heavy piece of equipment. TV presenters pose under umbrellas held by their assistants. A whole world of storytelling is rushing in, which has never bothered to report on the torture that Assange was undergoing in his dungeon, exactly one year ago when we were the only ones in Wikijustice to sound the alarm in October 2019.

At 7 o’clock there are already 30 journalists and photographers and then a few activists arrive: Jamie, who had made the siege of the passage in September but never comes to Westminster Court, then Alison the Australian. I greet them and risk leaving my post to see what’s going on in the street. There are 5 activists next to the journalists when an imposing bus of cops arrives: they are the policemen of the City of London Corporation recognizable by their red and white checkers on their kepi and wearing black uniforms. Their truck stops in front of Warwick Passage and obstructs my view. I retreat into the recess near the door. The policemen drive through the passage without noticing me. This is the time when the lady who lives behind the Old Bailey is walking her black dog. She comes out of the Amen Court, the historic 17th century houses that remain in the area after the severe Nazi bombing of the war. This is also the time when the employees of the Criminal Court, masked secretaries and security guards arrive. Rosie Sylvester, the clerk of the Assange trial in September, does not pass by. She has obviously finished her shift on her case, I haven’t seen her at Westminster either.

Half an hour of police presence later, shouts rang out in the street: the City of London Corporation police surrounded and silenced the activists who had come to support Assange without disturbing the armada of cameramen and other storytelling reporters who were now 50 in front of the main entrance. The sight of this pack coming to feast on the fate of a man in prison whom they didn’t care about when he could be saved, in summer, autumn and winter 2019, is very unpleasant for me. Not only were all these people absent when they could be of use, but they also echo without ever checking all the most abject storytelling, Assange rapes, Assange is going to commit suicide, Assange slumming in the embassy happily until he makes two children for his « lawyer »… It revolts me but I understand by watching them do today how Assange’s « concept » was artificially constructed: in 2010 there were, as there are today, more cameras to put on the show than real activists and real friends. Assange has always been a hostage of the political-media system and has never had the slightest freedom in the construction of his image and his life.

The police spare the storytellers from lying but threaten to arrest the activists: Alison is her friend and she is surrounded by the police so they shout that they don’t have the right to arrest them because the « covid laws » do not abolish human rights and they have the right to be in the street. The arm wrestling lasts 45 minutes: the policemen leave around 8 o’clock, the activists take refuge in the journalists’ camp or the police do not come to get them.

In the Warwick gut, I begin to wonder why I am alone. What if this is not the right entrance? But I’m afraid that if I move I’ll lose my hard-earned place. Security guards are starting to bring lawyers and Criminal Court staff into the main entrance. Around 8.20 I go to see one of them and ask him if this is the place for Julian Assange’s hearing. He answers: « Yes, don’t move. This is indeed the entrance of the public ». But there will be very few places because of the Covid. Only the family will be allowed ». I am obliged to trust the man because I have no choice.

I can’t stand the cold and fatigue. So who will be Julian Assange’s ‘family’? Is Stella Morris going to be the ‘family’ here or the ‘lawyer’ in the courtroom? At about 8.45 a.m. an elderly activist I saw at the Westminster comes to greet me and offers to bring me a coffee. I am so cold that I accept willingly without question where are the others, Greekemmy, Deepa, Rebecca Vincent. Two unknown women stand behind me and ask me if this is the place to wait for Assange’s hearing. I can only repeat to them the information received by the security guard. The obliging old lady comes back with two coffees. I drink mine, but I nevertheless ask her if she can ask at the entrance if the rules have not changed and that the entrance door to the trial is not to the north rather than to the south of the building. It is indeed impossible to be alone for so long, with 25 people on trial there would surely have been families or witnesses who would have had to wait with me as it was in September. At 9 o’clock the doors of the court open, there is movement in the street.

Then the heavy wooden door in front of me opens and a security guard appears. The Assange trial? But Madame, it’s door 2, north of the court, not here. I was cheated, including and especially by these « activists » who saw me waiting in the wrong place since 6 o’clock in the morning and didn’t say anything to me. I’m taken aback, but that’s the risk of being an activist in a hostile environment. Around the Assange case I met very few honest people and many liars, manipulators and even violent people. I know that I could not have expected anything better. But the cup of coffee offered to put my mistrust to sleep and make me lose time is the height of duplicity, especially since the woman slipped away once her mission was accomplished and I never saw her again. No time to waste, I leave and cross the hustle and bustle of the cameras in the street towards the 1907 building of the Old Bailey. The one that was so brightly lit the day before. I should have thought about it, been consistent in my logic. But I must not forget that I have behind me the difficult journey into the country of the covid reign while these people are there in their own country.

Indeed, it is Newgate Street, around another entrance that everyone is waiting for! Obviously, arriving at 9.15 am I am not the only one! Greekemmy, Rebecca Vincent, Fidel Narvaez and Deepa River can look at me with a mocking look, this time they had me fooled ! But in the Assange trial nothing was given on a bed of roses and at the same time there were always last-minute turnarounds. So I am not discouraged and I am stuck with the others between the work in the street and the grey stone wall of the Old Bailey.

In front of me there are about ten people in a hurry, but there are many who are heating up the queue for « more important », I know from experience that they won’t try to get in. They are not really having political discussions about Assange’s trial. They exchange smiles and news as if they were at the show or in an extra’s job. Moreover, some of them openly assume that they are professional actors. A sad and tired looking young woman distributes free hand painted « free Assange » T-shirts as if they had to be sold during the day. I take one. A female security guard in white and blue masked in black stands in the doorway of the open door. She asks for the family, but there is no one there, more exactly there is no John Shipton – he didn’t come. But 5 minutes later everyone pushes themselves to let Craig Murray pass, who acts as « Julian Assange’s family ». I am still upset that this man is Assange’s « family » because no relationship has been proven between them so far. Nor has it been proven that Assange wants this man to be the sole « relative » because at the Woolwich Court in 4 days of proceedings Julian Assange has not once greeted or nodded his head to Craig Murray. To see Craig Murray writing fictitious reports every day of the hearings when he doesn’t even have a pen and doesn’t even take notes makes me tremendously angry, this reality that I have seen with my own eyes. Since it is not possible to remember so many details of a trial every day in his memory and write every day for a month without having any notes, it is obvious that the script for these articles is written in advance, either by himself or by other storytellers. Who decides and why he has the primacy to come here as a FAMILY without ever standing in line? I ask the question again for the nth time in a year and a half!

This time too Craig Murray has no bag, no notebook, no pen, no coat as if he were coming straight out of a flat but he enters the Old Bailey first, followed by Deepa, Narvaez, Rebecca Vincent and a young man I don’t know. Greekemmy stays outside and takes souvenir photos with his friends. As everyone gathers around her, there are no more obstacles between me and the security guard at the door. I’m a member of a human rights association, I’m here as an observer, I’ve always come to the trial, I’ve been waiting here since 6 o’clock in the morning in the cold, the agents at the main gate made a mistake and assured me that I had to wait for Passage Warwick and I waited there for 4 hours… Why only one place for the family and 4 places for the public when we know that the public galleries have 40 places, I saw it in September? The woman doesn’t seem to be smiling, you can’t see anything with the mask on and diplomacy is very difficult when you can’t see the face of the person you’re talking to. I wear the mask on my chin to show my respect for the rules, but I also show her my face so that she can see my tiredness but also the absence of hostility. She says yes, it’s because of the covid that there are so few places, but she doesn’t tell me to leave. When I ask her why human rights associations cannot be accredited in court and who decides on this refusal, she tells me to « go to the judge ».

I objected, « But the judge who judges Julian Assange is not a judge of the Central Criminal Court. The Old Bailey does not respond to our letters, which is logical since it is not the Central Criminal Court that judges Assange. You as an institution have nothing to do with this trial, I know that. But Judge Assange never responds to any requests because she has no mail as a judge. The Westminster Court where she is supposed to sit tells us that they are not the ones organising the trial here. So, who decides what happens in your institution ?

The woman seems embarrassed but does not answer. Then I see Elliot and Esther Shipton, the wife of John Shipton’s brother and the son of this couple arriving at the door. They had been the privileged ones who could observe Assange in person in Room 10 in September. This time, without John Shipton, they were ruthlessly turned away by the officer. Obviously they are no longer family. Little satisfaction for me to see the others unable to enter. An unknown journalist shows up in front of me in front of the camera. I am so overwhelmed that I pour my bitterness into his camera, perhaps carelessly. I say that this trial is a fake, that Julian Assange is not being tried by the Criminal Court, that we don’t know who is renting the historic Old Bailey for the show, but that it is a shame to use the institutions of a sovereign state to have such fun. Who is the judge? Vanessa Baraitser has no social existence, does not appear on any official document nor here at the Criminal Court not even the Westminster Court where she is supposed to be Magistrate, it is a shame that human rights associations cannot see the trial and especially see the state of Assange when so many threats weigh on her health. We are going back to the Middle Ages and the covid has a good back in the installation of the dictatorship, unless we never left the Middle Ages here…In short, I say part of what we analysed in our International Wikijustice Complaint and our 14th request for release which has just left [1].

I feel the young woman guarding the entrance more and more embarrassed, but my tirade is not addressed to her, she remains impassive. It is about 10.30 am when a young brown woman approaches me and asks if this is indeed the trial of Julian Assange. The others are eating their picnic, so we are alone in front of the door. Her name is Ellie, she is a sociologist and she is a Greek living here. I’m glad to see someone coming through the Greek activist networks we’ve moved thanks to Anastasia Politi and her friends from Greeks for Assange. We talk in Greek and we have plenty of time to socialise. I tell him about my experience of the hearings from 20 September 2019 through 21 October 2019, 13 January, the last week of February at the Woolwich Court and 9 September – all the times I have been able to see Julian Assange in the flesh. We are discussing the precedent that this extradition sets for them refusing US bases in our countries. We also have plenty of time to discuss what a mafia state and a corrupt and perverted police and legal system is: I tell him about my militancy in Greece since 2005 and the Social Forums, my trade union activities in Santorini and the repression I suffered with the trial-cabal from 2009 to 2013. And I recall the attack on Konstantina Kuneva, vitriolised in December 2008 by the exploitative mafia close to the authorities following our actions for the rights of workers from Eastern Europe.

I feel stronger no longer being alone and I have regained hope. After all, if someone comes out, maybe I can come in… It’s about 11 o’clock (I don’t have a watch or a phone as they are not allowed in the Old Bailey) when Craig Murray comes out, immediately surrounded by the activists. He is the one who announces the news of the non-extradition. But it’s not very clear in his mouth and with the mask it’s even harder for me. I rather have the impression that he is saying that Baraitser has not accepted the political arguments about freedom of expression, the stress remains, I’m ready for anything. Murray was forced to go down and tell the activists the news because he doesn’t have a mobile phone (and still no pen…). He goes back inside and we stay with Ellie and wonder about the meaning of it. She has a mobile phone and is looking for a way to hide it somewhere or give it to someone. Unfortunately from where we are, far from the demonstration in front of the central door, I can’t see if my friends have come. So we continue our discussions in Greek and it gives me pleasure to immerse myself in the language of this country that I have loved and that has meant so much to me politically and personally. The memories of the blue Greek Sea and the projects keep me here in the cold of the North. I think about how to regain our freedom knowing that in Greece too the regime has imposed curfew for the first time since 1976 and the colonels. Only Crete would not respect these « covid measures » and as always revolts first.

At 12.25 pm, Fidel Narvaez and Rebecca Vincent go out. My patience is rewarded: I can enter. I rush into the dark staircase which looks like the one of the Warwick passage. A few steps up, you have to lock your bag in a metal detector, throw food and bottles in a bin, open your coats… The security guard who inspects my things is the tall white-haired man who used to work at the Warwick Passage and who was on duty during the day when I surreptitiously saw Assange in room 10… He knows me, I greet him, I remember him.

It’s quicker than in September, I’m released and I can run up the austere staircase to the 4th floor, a sort of large vestibule with windows that seem high here but in reality are the smallest of those overlooking the street (and which were illuminated the day before). This space is reminiscent of 19th century schools as Paris is populated by them: high walls, large windows, distant ceilings, solid dark wood furniture, a hushed atmosphere and austere corridors. I continue in the corridor running along the doors of rooms 2 and 4. In which of these rooms is Julian Assange?

Two security guards are working in front of room 4. The first one, a nice old man, tells me it’s break time and invites me to wait in the hall. He will come and pick us up. I sit on a bench in front of a table in the waiting room when Ellie arrives. We resume our discussions, while Deepa and Craig Murray talk on their side. Unfortunately I don’t understand much of what Craig Murray is saying when he is the only eyewitness in Room 2. At this time it is confirmed that Julian Assange will not be extradited, but not because he is a political prisoner, but because of his « psychiatric condition » following the « medical reports produced by experts in September ».

That is all we fear: that the pseudo expert opinions of psychiatrists whose independence from both the royal and the American system is not certain will lead Assange straight to confinement in a psychiatric hospital, where we will never see him again. This is all the more disgusting to me because when Wikijustice alerted in October, November, December 2019 and January 2020 about the traces of torture that Julian Assange had visibly suffered in captivity, and we wrote 3 medical reports and demanded an independent medical report, neither the lawyers nor the activists reacted favourably[2].

They were all held up to the fable of the « wicked Belmarsh prison » and convinced that « nothing can be done » while Gareth Peirce complained that « he can’t visit his client ». Meanwhile, the system that keeps Assange in captivity was bringing in American psychiatrists to examine him, who knows if it wasn’t against his will … The great revolt that Juliana Assange showed on February 26th and 27th at the Woolwich Court reminds us that it is not proven that he agrees with this strategy of psychiatricisation of his person imposed by the lawyers (and the lawyers’ founder, the Courage Corp and the Wau Holland Stiftung…).

We still wait another quarter of an hour when Georgia arrives, present at all the hearings and she always comes by. She asks us if Rebecca Vincent is there and checks why we are so cold: there is no heating in the august court. I remember the obnoxious air conditioning that used to spit stale air at us on the other side, rooms 9 and 10. At last that’s the signal at about 12.50. The security guard comes to pick us up and opens the door to room 2 for Craig Murray. So Assange is there, I reach for his neck but I can’t see anything. I have to make do with room 4 and that’s not so bad. We find ourselves 4 scattered on the balcony with green leather armchairs on brown benches like in a 19th century theatre. Ellie sits just one row above me and together we pass on vital information. Below, the room is large and has 4 high judge’s chairs on a platform. They are empty and a computer junk scatters the tables on the stage. At the bottom of the stage, the room’s furniture is made up of 4 rows of tables arranged in a school-style row. It is very different from the decor of a european Court of Justice. The box for the accused is a small empty platform on the right. There are 50 seats, but only 10 people, supposedly journalists, are seated scattered in front of the tables at a rate of 3 or 4 per row. I note their location. They are mostly young women with long blond hair whom I have never seen in the halls of either the Westminster or the Woolwich or even here in September. There are no famous faces, no politicians like the German MP Heike Hänsel and if there are German diplomats they are not the same ones as in September.

They look like students or trainees. They look at the screen where the political tragedy of the century is played out impassively, without any emotion. As if they were attending the presentation of a study « case » for their school. Two grey haired men with more casual looks look more like journalists and sit in the left row facing the girls staring at the screen above them. I can look at the screen above the judges’ platform in front of me. It’s quite big but divided into two parts: on the right side appears Mark Summers’ head, talking about a desk full of files. Summers is therefore not physically present at the Old Bailey. On the left side of the room there is a room similar to this one: it is the retransmission of room 2. But we don’t see Assange there. The camera is filming from a strange angle: it shows tables in the middle and two rows of high armchairs in staggered rows. On the right row I can see people, maybe Baraitser, on the left row it’s full too but I can only make out those I already know: Clair Dobbin thanks to his long blond hair. I think I recognise Fitzgerald next to Dobbin but the picture is quite distant. Besides I recognise Baraitser’s voice more than I recognise his silhouette.

Fitzgerald stands up, then it is Dobbin’s turn, Baraitser talks about the Extradition Act of 2003, then the lawyer quotes « section 1-3-4 ». The atmosphere is relaxed, familiar, like after a job where one would have done a « good job ». Summers is talking to the screen but he has the odd stuttering voice of Fitzgerald. I don’t know if I should concentrate on the debates or watch for the moment or maybe the camera will show Assange. Is he only there? No photo of him has been published for a year, on 13 January 2020 in the famous van de Serco outside the Westminster where he had met the president of Wikijustice Véronique Pidancet-Barrière, who had entered as a journalist, for an hour[3] … His face is still engraved in my memory, but I can’t print this image and I’m not good enough at drawing to recompose what I have in my head. It’s a great pity because I can only give you such an imperfect testimony…

The atmosphere is so relaxed in the hushed room that Mark Summers can be seen drinking his coffee at home while Clair Dobbin and Baraitser discuss the « costs of the trial ». I’m surprised: we’re not going to make Assange pay for the costs of his repression! It was the British Crown that agreed to prosecute him on the basis of the European Arrest Warrant as if the basis of the Extradition Treaty, let them manage to pay for their rental rooms at the Old Bailey! Suddenly I hear Baraitser talking to Assange, she talks about « remand in custody » until 6 January, and that « application for bail » will be considered. Finally someone has applied for release! But why on bail?! Julian Assange is NO LONGER being prosecuted, he should be out FREE THROUGH THE BIG DOOR!

Why is he still locked up? It’s not legal! If an extradition request is rejected, there is NO REASON for keeping a man in detention: it is arbitrary detention, hostage taking in fact. Remand in custody » only applies to those awaiting trial, but here there are NO MORE trials! The extradition procedure which is not a trial IS FINISHED! And even if the opposing party appeals, it cannot appeal because it is not provided for in the extradition treaty! The only thing the opposing party can do is to make another extradition request and go through diplomatic channels as it should be!

ASSANGE IS A MAN FREE OF RIGHTS. HE SHOULD BE FREE TO DO SO.

He should come out of the bunker at last, get out of the bloody box and go out into Old Bailey Street… He should be able to talk to the media himself instead of self-proclaimed wives or friends speaking for him. We should be able to talk to him and offer him our help for a stay with our friends in England, France or elsewhere. Moreover, after the verdict the court should give him back his passport and all his documents so that he can regain his dignity as a citizen. But I wonder if Julian Assange ever possessed the attributes of a citizen such as an identity card, a passport. No one would ever think of demanding that the system give them back to him, as if it were already normal for him to be a prisoner of war in a medieval regime. He is not guilty, but he remains captive. As one quickly gets used to the intolerable violation of liberties, for the last 2 years we have had the terrifying spectacle of it.

Julian Assange remains captive and that doesn’t surprise him either… Because suddenly, while a hubbub is perceptible on the screen signalling that the meeting is over, the camera zooms in on the left side of room 2 and shows…. Assange! It even shows him up close and at some length. I’m sitting 10 metres from the screen but I can see it clearly. Ellie points at the screen with great emotion and comments on what she sees. It’s never too much here to cross our impressions. The camera shows Julian Assange from the side: he is sitting behind a wooden fence but I don’t see a glass box. He is wearing a grey suit and a big dark blue or black scarf mask around his neck, the kind of big scarf you need when you are cold. And it’s cold in these walls and he’s cold, I’ve seen him with jumpers in the middle of summer. He has medium long hair like he did in 2009 and I feel like his face is hairless and he doesn’t wear glasses. As I can’t distinguish the features of his face, I concentrate on his gestures. First he sits down and leans forward to talk to someone. I see Baltazar Garzon! Garzon is indeed a chief decision-maker in this ceremony, but how can he sit in a British court when he is neither a lawyer nor a judge in Britain and when the Brexit is pronounced, any European regulations no longer automatically apply?

In any case, Garzon is the most important person who decides what happens next because Assange speaks to him at length after the verdict. But he doesn’t shake his hand as in the dramatic moments at the Woolwich Court in February 2020, there is no outpouring of emotion. Obviously the verdict was already known, moreover the judgement was published on the internet and it is obvious that Judge Baraitser did not write the 110 pages overnight but that it was known and ready well in advance[4].

Julian Assange’s attitude, his graceful gesture is the same as the man I saw 8 times in real life and 13 times on video. I saw him for 45 minutes on October 21 and January 13, for hours in February 2020 and then very fleetingly on December 20, 2019 and September 9, 2020. I notice that he looks comfortable, rather solid, not too thin. He doesn’t look like an autistic psychotic who wouldn’t understand what’s going on. This psychiatricisation is really abusive. Moreover, while I’m wondering how to do it, once I’ve seen him for HIM to SEE ME, Julian Assange gets up and turns around in front of the camera. I see him tall, but a little stooped, like on October 21, 2019 and September 9. He turns gracefully towards us like a dancer towards his audience. Like when he greeted us when he came out of the show on the 27th of February, the last day of the Woolwich Court. I have the impression that he knows that we are there, faithful against all odds… I lowered my mask so that in case there is still a possibility of seeing the public gallery now or later he can recognise me in my purple costume.

It’s over, the security guard is coming to pick us up. I send Ellie to talk to him while I stay to scrutinize Assange: I am not leaving until he is there or until I am fired. The camera continues to show him as the spectators below leave. Finally, with regret, I decide to get up… We talk to the security guard. The man seems to be as upset about this trial as we are. I ask him if the hearing on the 6th will be here or at the Westminster Court. He replies vehemently, « Madam, it will certainly be in the Westminster Magistrate Court! We have nothing to do with this trial! We are dealing with terrorists here! It is not our role to decide on extraditions! « He is wounded in his dignity as an honest working man who is asked to act as a guard to imprison journalists. I’m starting the conversation. I tell him that we know that the Old Bailey and its judges judge real criminals and not citizens guilty of nothing but publishing information and who should not be imprisoned at any time. But who is in charge, who is really organising the trial of Julian Assange? Who is imposing this spectacle within the august walls of the Criminal Court? The man won’t tell me, but he forcefully repeats that his institution has nothing to do with Julian Assange’s situation. It is not her who imprisons him. I tell him again that according to the Assange Law, he should go free from here the minute extradition is refused….

He agrees and this makes his refusal to take part in the masquerade all the more authentic. We explain to him, I the Polish, Ellie the Greek, how much we fear for ourselves and for our friends fighting in our countries if this dangerous precedent of extradition for political opinion were to be imposed. He listens to us and we kindly take leave of him and his colleague, a real armed policeman (we are dealing with terrorists here, Madam, real ones…- he repeated to us again at the end…). I come out exhausted walking through the long, austere corridors. Outside it’s still cold but it’s jubilant. 400 photographers and reporters surround us, we don’t really see who, Stella Morris or Hrafnsson. We look for the activist who kept Ellie’s mobile phone and we meet our French and English friends in the demonstration full of joy for once. But Julian Assange remains locked up. The hope of seeing him out on bail the day after tomorrow is tarnished by this obvious denial of justice that an innocent man, who is no longer being prosecuted by anyone, is still being held captive completely illegally. Under the storytelling pretext of an appeal that does not exist in the legal texts.*

We have a large hot coffee in a single open Starbucks from where the employees are ruthlessly chasing us away: the famous Covid Rules! Stronger than Law and Human Rights! The new social and political standard for multinationals! I’m exhausted, I have to make my report. I take leave of my old and new friends and go back to the hotel. We have to prepare to go to Westminster Court for a final battle. But I saw Julian Assange. He is alive and well. This is so essential.

---

[1]  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rCPKk9vdY29H_kaHjqeClvJtQ62_cw7W/view?usp=drive_web

[2] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/USA-v-Assange-judgment-040121.pdf

Page 100 à 110

[3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/audience-du-13012020-face-à-avec-julian-assange-véronique/

https://vk.com/@430817373-13012020-hearing-face-to-face-with-julian-assange

[4] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/USA-v-Assange-judgment-040121.pdf

Julian Assange in the Old Bailey on 4 January 2021

Monika Karbowska

The decision delivered on 4 January 2021 in the Old Bailey building in London is known. It is a victory for the European social movements that have been mobilising to free Julian Assange for the past two years, and in particular for the French Yellow Vests movement. But it is also just one step in the war that opposes the people to the pseudo mafia elites who oppress us as much as they imprison Julian Assange. Indeed, we did not fight against the extradition of Julian Assange but FOR HIS LIBERATION. Legally, Julian Assange is a FREE man because he is no longer prosecuted by any jurisdiction. So why didn’t he leave through the front door of the courthouse at 12:25 pm immediately after the verdict was announced? Why is it that on 6 January 2021, after the secret dealings in the Westminster Magistrate Court, he is still not with us enjoying freedom, walking the streets, talking with us and preparing for a long journey to more welcoming skies?

I am going to answer this question with my article while relating the efforts I have made within the Wikijustice association to be always present at all its hearings. The aim is also to make my fellow citizens understand what we are living in Europe and how they must be prepared to fight for their freedom if they want to survive other than as serfs subject to the right of life and death of a mafia power. For we are no different from Julian Assange: prisoner for a year of arbitrary power, we live in our flesh the confinement and deprivation of rights by collective consent.

I had made a trip to Julian Assange’s last hearing to extend his « pre-trial detention » (or according to what Judge Ikram told me on October 29th, « call over hearing » on December 11th, 2020. I had taken advantage of this trip, which allowed me to get some fresh air by leaving France for a few days under an abject police yoke, where even the vital act of breathing was criminalised. I had enjoyed long walks without masks in the districts of Paddington and Islington and above all the joy of seeing life return to a peaceful London, of observing children and teenagers living their lives normally in training to the submission of the gag and the fear of the other. I had been happy to record the scenes of daily life in the reopened pubs and restaurants, the music, the encounters, the joy of life returning. I had even published and transmitted these images to friendly restaurateurs in France in order to incite them to fight for their reopening.

I had learned a lot from this trip and I wanted to share this information with my fellow citizens. Unfortunately the political power intensified its dictatorial pressure on us as the festivities approached and I had to participate in the finalisation of the International Wikijustice Complaint which became our main tool in the legal fight. Also working as a proletarian to provide for myself, I only had the time and strength to write my article. So I will include some information in this story so that it is clear what is at stake for ALL of US in the struggle for the liberation of Julian Assange.

Travelling, Sovereignty and Fundamental Rights

I don’t understand why so many people around me in Western Europe are convinced that it is now forbidden to travel and that « the borders are closed ». The good news is that no, the borders are NOT closed and it is still as it was before March 11th « allowed » to travel. The bad news is that so many people don’t understand what their rights and freedoms are, being convinced that when five guys on television say something, not only is it true, but miraculously it becomes law. No, what the guys say on TV and even if their name is Macron, it does not have the force of Law and is not a REGULATION of our society.

Our society is based on a corpus of Laws whose hierarchy is established as follows: first at the top are the Fundamental Natural and Inalienable Rights guaranteed by International Texts including the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all the Human Rights Covenants in the custody of the UN. The right to liberty, life, security, inviolability of the home, privacy and the prohibition of torture are the fundamental rights that everyone should have in their heart and brain when they hear a man on TV telling him that « the state of health emergency forbids you to leave the house and that the police can come and check how many people are at the table ». These so-called « Covid measures » are simply forbidden by law and are therefore serious violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The UDHR also states in Article 13 that « everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country »[1]. This is the basis of the « right to travel ». Naturally, the second floor of the Corpus is our Constitution, the foundation and most important part of which is the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 as well as the Preamble of the Constitution of 1946 which is part of the Constitution of 1958[2]. This « old text », as an unwise Internet user would say, is the basis for the fact that we do not need the authorisation of Castex or Macron to have the right to live. Article 2: « The aim of all political associations is the conservation of natural and imprescriptible human rights. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression ». Keep this in mind when Castex tells you on TV that the coronavirus forbids you to cross the threshold of your house, to walk in the street or to breathe without a gag. So our Constitution begins like this: « In the aftermath of the victory won by the free peoples over the regimes that tried to enslave and degrade the human person, the French people once again proclaim that every human being, without distinction of race, religion or belief, possesses inalienable and sacred rights. It solemnly reaffirms the rights and freedoms of man and citizen enshrined in the Declaration of Rights of 1789 and the fundamental principles recognised by the laws of the Republic ».

On this basis, all laws, decrees and ministerial circulars must be in accordance with the Constitution and if they are not or if their interpretation is not clear, it is always the « inalienable and sacred rights » that prevail. There is no « health emergency » or other « emergency » that limits Fundamental Rights by any ministerial circular or « law of exception » issued as a matter of urgency by 5 individuals in an empty National Assembly. There is NO state of health emergency provided for in our Constitution. How many times must this be repeated? On this basis, and since the government knows very well that it is breaking the law, an arrest of someone who wants to « leave his country » is an arbitrary arrest. Likewise, the government has no right to prevent a citizen from returning to his or her country of nationality. To do so is a serious abuse, a very serious abuse of right. Banishment no longer exists in our civilization since the modern state was constituted as a Sovereign. Both banishment and arbitrary arrest are instruments of Tyranny, which is prohibited by Our Constitution. Resistance to Tyranny is provided for both in Our Constitution and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The sovereign state was hardly constituted on the basis of the definition of a single power over a territory defined by borders. It was the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 that established the legal premises of territory and borders. Sovereignty is from it defined as power over a territory to the exclusion of power of others over these territories. Clearly, states undertake not to interfere in the affairs of the other, to sow disorder, to pay internal enemies to destroy the internal neighbour[3]. Since the Revolutions of 1789 and the difficult struggle for Democracy and the Republic, it is the people who decide on their sovereignty and manage their territory » Constitution of 4 October 1958: « Title I – OF SOUVERAIGNETY ARTICLE 2. The motto of the Republic is « Liberty, Equality, Fraternity ». Its principle is: government of the people, by the people and for the people ».

A State is sovereign over its territory, which is delimited by borders. This sovereignty and these borders are valid if they are recognised by its peers, the other States. This is the foundation of RECIPROCITY, the basis of international law and the functioning of diplomacy. This is why international recognition by OTHER States is so important when a Nation wishes to create a State and creates, accedes to or wrenches its independence. Today it is adherence to the United Nations system and Charter that guarantees this independence and gives the Citizens of that State the security that their fundamental rights will be respected by their fellow human beings, the other humans in the world organised in the system. This is why borders are NOT a travel ban and not even an obstacle to cross. The borders of my state are also the borders of my neighbour, so I have to make sure that my state gets along with its neighbour so that I can travel to its neighbour. In accordance with the principle of reciprocal recognition, the rules for crossing borders must be clearly established, valid for everyone and identical for the citizens of both States. For hundreds of years, states have regulated their relations by bilateral treaties which have the force of law in their respective territories. These treaties are valid as long as other treaties have not replaced them (in the same way that a 200 year old Constitution is still valid even in the age of RNA vaccines and mobile tracing if it has not been replaced by another one).

Why am I writing this, which looks like a civic education course for 12-year-olds? Because I see that my contemporary fellow citizens have forgotten all about these basics or even never knew anything about them, convinced that Macron has the right of life and death over them or that the European Union has « given them the right to travel » and that now it is taking it away from them by the virtue of Véran’s decisions, so they must « stay at home ». « How could you go to Poland? I was asked half outraged half admiring in November. « Everyone has the right to leave their country, including their own, and return to it » – so I took the plane and then the bus back. In the same way the « Brexit » is not the « apocalyptic catastrophe » that uncultured storytellers repeat and sow the seeds of lies. Great Britain applies the bilateral treaties that it has signed throughout its existence and which have never ceased to be valid even when the European Union claimed to cap national jurisprudence with a hat of « universal supranationality », which in reality is illegal. The European Union is in reality only an International Treaty between 27 States – currently the Treaty of Lisbon. Moreover, what does Article 2 say? « The Union shall provide its citizens with an area of freedom, security and justice without internal borders, in which the free movement of persons is ensured. The Treaty of Lisbon is still valid and no coronavirus has the power to suspend it. The right to move within the EU is still valid, that’s why I went to Poland and came back.

And this is why I was able to go to Great Britain from 10 to 14 December 2020. After 1 January 2021 Great Britain and France returned to regulating traffic between neighbouring countries on the basis of a bilateral treaty. I invite everyone to read in the Official Journal the number of old bilateral treaties still in force: they are innumerable and regulate the circulation of goods and persons, as well as the rights of students, workers, social security equivalence, pension payments… it is a mine of very reassuring information which shows us that the « New World » of the neo-liberals is a cult myth: the world is still based on legal regulations and/or ancient or modern traditions but still valid as long as they are not denounced or cancelled. Don’t listen to the TV that makes you « seltzer water of our brain » (as we say in Polish). In this case it is important to refer directly to the legal texts and it is very damaging and abusive that France has not published the agreement it signed with Great Britain on 24 December 2020 after its blockade of the port of Dover. The era of secret treaties should be over!

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[1] https://www.un.org/fr/universal-declaration-human-rights/

[2] Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen de 1789 – Légifrance (legifrance.gouv.fr)

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/contenu/menu/droit-national-en-vigueur/constitution/declaration-des-droits-de-l-homme-et-du-citoyen-de-1789

[3] https://mjp.univ-perp.fr/traites/1648westphalie.htm

Crossing borders against fear on 10 December 2020

Perhaps it is because I am the daughter of a diplomat from communist Poland that I know that borders are meant to be crossed – legally. My father issued Polish visas for 42 years and he never thought that a visa could be an obstacle to come somewhere, on the contrary, according to consular law it is ONE RIGHT to come, to cross a border. In the 80s when I was a teenager every state in Europe had its borders. Each State had signed a multitude of bilateral treaties with all the States of our continent, which effectively formed a single civilisation. The most visible border was the border between the two systems, communist and capitalist, materialised by the Wall separating West Germany and the German Democratic Republic and surrounding the West Berlin enclave inside the GDR. But this border was by no means a mythical iron curtain, it was francissable and crossed on a daily basis. Tourists, professionals, students and truck drivers applied for short- and long-stay visas and travelled by train, plane and car in tens of thousands of individual travellers between East, West, North and South. Western European countries started to abolish visas among themselves to facilitate the tourist industry in the early 1980s, Eastern European countries maintained visas BETWEEN THEM, but these visas were only formalities and were granted by state travel agencies that organised and facilitated travel. Poles, Germans and Hungarians travelled to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria for the Mediterranean sunshine, while citizens of these countries came to ski in winter or visit Polish cities. The integration movement was also continuing here through bilateral regulation. In 1988 a Pole could travel without a visa to Greece and Austria to West Berlin, GDR, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia for a short stay and they did not refrain from doing so. What was at stake was rather to force our state to grant us a passport « at home », whereas the communist system wanted to reserve the right to grant or refuse the right to a passport, and therefore to leave or return to its citizen. The first thing I did when I turned 18 in March 1989 was to ask for my passport and « keep it at home ».

Since then, I have crossed many borders, since Western Europe was a very difficult border for Eastern Europeans to cross until 1992, when the additional Schengen protocol was signed. From 1989 to 1992 a Pole had to prove that he had 500 FF (80 Euros) per day for just a 10-day tourist stay in France, a certificate of accommodation signed by a Frenchman and watch out for him if he exceeded his stay in France by one day: he risked having a no-stay stamp in his passport when he left the country! These were the conditions under which I came to France in 1992, like so many other Eastern Europeans, and we didn’t complain about them: it seemed natural to us that a sovereign state should control its borders. However, we would have liked the rule of reciprocity to apply to French nationals as well. But our countries were weak, on the verge of being colonised, and distributed residence permits generously to French nationals, whereas France refused our requests for long-stay visas and distributed « OQTFs » (deportation order – obligation to leave the territory) in response to our requests, rather than « carte de séjour », « permit to stay », until 2005. I know what I’m talking about, I was a foreign student with a residence permit without rights and precarious, then without papers, from 1992 to 2001

For me the way I can cross a border is the barometer of the real state of relations between the two neighbouring states. This is why it is important to turn off your TV and take the plane, train, bus, car and bicycle and go and test the reality on the ground, the reality of political relations. On 10 December 2020 I tested Franco-British relations by taking Charles de Gaulle’s plane to London. The airport was totally disorganised by the multitudes of people wanting to leave our country when entire terminals had been put out of use and the RER B, so crowded as normal, was deserted. It must be said that the air became unbreathable in our country with these « confinements », « prohibition to go out without aussweis » and « obligatory mask everywhere, for everyone and in all times ». The British Airways check-in counter was full of distinguished and rather elderly Englishmen who had chosen our country as their home for its lifestyle and social security… Both died. Hospitals are now mortuary places that anyone over 55 must avoid if they are ill, otherwise they risk « covid » isolation and sudden death without their loved ones being able to defend them. As for the art of living, you know what is happening in our empty, desertified cities with the brutal and abusive closure of cafés, restaurants, places of culture, associations, public meetings, places of worship, political parties, etc. etc. The list of prohibitions is as long as the day without bread of the serf before 1789.

The old English returned to their country loaded with heavy luggage, whereas young French took the plane for Asia, the place of the future where moreover one does not wear a mask everywhere, with all due respect to our friends on the left who think they are « more Chinese than the Chinese » by imposing the fashionable muzzle on us. The plane was full but the trip was very short and pleasant, I could see the mainland finishing, the grey inlet was spreading out for 10 minutes and here we were already landing in the fog at Heathrow after flying over Windsor Castle which is actually next to the international airport. The airport seemed huge to me, as big as the one in Beijing, quite luxurious. The rich or upper-middle class globalist public of the Commonwealth reminded me how much for a year now I have been living with the poorest classes, migrant workers in the Flixbus, migrants are Europeans who can be judged in this « Westminster Magistrate Court » where Assange is « judged » as a public of marginalised and homeless people living in the hostels in the surrounding district and often coming to the « demonstrations » in support of Assange. I was particularly displeased to see a very classy young man forcing a mask on their 2-3 year old child, they wore the tool on their own faces so proudly that it looked like social status again, an advertisement shouting « look, we are the new corona world ». But the real Franco-British border was actually very welcoming. The man in border police uniform was unmasked in his stall. He replied to my smile and asked me when he took my passport why I didn’t register at the automatic control reserved for « European nationals ». I answered spontaneously « Because I prefer humans to machines »! No further questions. He wished me a very pleasant stay!

Living Freedom in London in December 2020

This beautiful welcome gave me a lot of happiness and courage! As soon as I got off the metro and having easily integrated a beautiful hotel in Paddington, I threw the gag mask on and went out for a very long walk with my nose to the wind north of Paddington – Abbey Road with the famous studios, Finchley Road with the small houses including Freud’s House and the Tavistock and Portman Center… I photographed and filmed the pubs and restaurants open to show that we lived normally here and that nobody was afraid of a covid. In a pub near Finchley Road I enjoyed my cocktail like a prison escapee and with permission I photographed the joie de vivre of the young people chatting there. The next day I was at 6am first thing in the morning outside the door of the Westminster Magistrate Court, tired but finally confident. Julian Assange still has to report to the remand centre, you have to be there, always, without exception, to show that you don’t give up.

The next day, after Julian’s failure to appear but the appearance of a new judge, Judge Paul Goldspring, I still managed to go for a very long walk in the Islington area of North London. I wanted at all costs to walk a long way to enjoy the air without masks and the happiness of people to live normally. In this area live the Bobo middle classes but also the working classes of migrant origin in pretty brick blocks of flats in gardens. It is like a kind of Montreuil. I used to see young British people in groups in the pedestrian zone meeting up, kissing and laughing, then eating at the kébab together, then dancing in the street and chatting while listening to music at full speed…. I saw the children playing merrily everywhere, the parents walking around chatting and preparing Christmas shopping…. And I thought of the French children suffocating under the mask 10 hours a day… the youngsters languishing locked up at home without any contact that the computer…

 I still cannot believe my eyes that we accept such tyranny and destruction of the Nation, of the People, of our FUTURE without thinking. In the land of Human Rights, the lives of children are being destroyed with relentless determination… In a modest neighbourhood pub I spent euphoric moments drinking a simple beer, listening to music and watching young people play billiards. In London on that day, December 12th, I felt Freedom like I haven’t felt it since 1991. And I understood once again that Freedom has always been my primary driving force. Freedom not to be locked up in my father’s house, freedom not to be locked up by a system. The freedom not to be poor and deprived of rights. The freedom to live with dignity. All those who are astonished that I am today against the covid dictatorship and that I do not consider the Chinese regime as our model (it is another question of knowing if « the Chinese regime » is indeed the one presented to us…) have misunderstood the deep meaning of my action and my political choices. Freedom is the condition for all political action. Without it we do not even choose the struggle for Justice. Without it we are no longer human beings.

While the police in France were ruthlessly hitting citizens in the street who had become serfs in their own country, I witnessed a scene that moved me with joy: at a crossroads, a crashed car was stopped in the middle of the street, behind it a municipal police car. Instinctively I tried to flee, as I do now in my home town of Paris, as soon as I saw a police uniform in the distance. Then I reasoned: no mask is compulsory, I have no reason to feel guilty. I approached to cross the street. And now I see that the perpetrator of the accident is a tall, totally drunk man who babbled in approximate English with a strong Ukrainian accent: « I assure you, Madam, that I am guilty, yes! I must never drink again! You were right to stop me! Take me to jail! I love my wife and children but I must stop drinking! « And then I see the young blonde policewoman holding the tall man by the arm and gently saying to him « don’t worry, we’re not going to take you to prison, but to the hospital where you’ll be treated », while her two colleagues were calmly discussing how they were going to get the car off the road. It was Friday evening, the man was drunk and dead, he had had an accident and he wasn’t afraid of the cops! If last wave migrants have such faith in the justice of the British police system, then yes, this country has a future! And will be able to rebuild a sovereignty!

Certainly, it was Islington and central London, Charing Cross station where I took the train to Dover was already another policy because obviously another municipality: even if the shops were open and the crowds were dense for Christmas shopping, the mask was severely imposed at the station and in the shops, while the big chains owning the restaurants imposed tracing by application. Not wanting the Imperial College of London managing the NHA to know where I eat and where I go to the toilet, I sat on the floor like in Paris with a coffee to go. Then I took the train and arrived in less than two hours in the small town of Dover at my small, cosy hotel in front of the station.

Dover or the oppression of the poor

But after that it was a different story: I went out in the evening to Dover and walked towards the city centre, the imposing castle of Henri Plantagenet, the seafront and found the city unusually quiet and deserted for a Saturday evening. I found an Indian restaurant open and went in. In a small hallway a man explained to me that the « corona » state had been declared in the area and that therefore only take-away sales were allowed. The man sold the food to me at a high price and again he made me wait outside in the cold as if my presence alone brought the plague to his establishment. I wanted to plant it there but there was nothing else to eat in the town and all the other pubs and restaurants were closed. On my way back I came across the police for the third time as they were touring the small town. I lengthened my stride to lock myself up in the hotel, rediscovering my reflexes of France under dictatorship: find or hide, building site or bush so as not to have to risk the arbitrary violence of the cops. Because yes, I know how to cross borders but I am like everyone else when faced with violence from the cops: I am afraid and I try to avoid it. What I would like is NOT TO HAVE TO BE FEAR OF THEM. It’s to live in a democracy where the cops respect my rights and the Laws. Suddenly around midnight, while the streets remained deserted, cars converged on the countryside to what must have been private parties in the houses… Good thing that the youth is having fun, in this world of bullies, we need to LIVE!

The next day I had to face the famous lockdown in the Kent region: in the centre of Dover there was still a bookshop, a toy shop, a souvenir shop open but the owners didn’t know what to do with their goods, only the poor man’s 1 pound supermarkets were making money. I found a small café that made good british breakfasts and was happy to talk to the owner a very friendly Indian coffeshop owner who also allowed me to use his toilet. For him as for everyone else, the covid is pure political bullshit with which the rich cheat and still oppress the poor. But he blamed the British government as a whole without being able to explain the role of the municipality of Dover, which, led by very covidian Labour, adds bans, regulations and police threats to a small town that needs tourism to survive. Covid propaganda was omnipresent in Dover in the form of posters and illuminated signs, while in Paddington and Islington in London at the same time there were no masks in many shops! The man believed as strongly that the vaccine would stop the madness and I could not warn him against a belief that would no doubt hold him. He even allowed me to sit down and welcomed in his shop an old neighbour who had just come to talk to him… Coffee is used to meet, not just to warm up in winter and consume… That’s why the Covidian sect wants to destroy the notion of a meeting place…

After having had breakfast on a bench in the rain, I ended up going up to visit the superb Chateau des Plantagenets, built in the time of the Normans to protect themselves from France! The castle has always been the « guardian of England » and its fortifications were used against Napoleon’s blockade and the first cross-channel bombs of the German « Big Bertha » that managed to reach the island were improved or sent back to the mainland. The castle of Dover is also known to have been the headquarters of the British army’s operation to reembark from the beaches of Dunkirk in a France that was in disarray in July 1940. This masterful operation, considered a victory by the British (and a defeat by France, whose soldiers were nevertheless able to avoid captivity by being evacuated to England by the flotilla of « little ships », the fishing and trading boats that took part in the operation…) was organised and directed from the headquarters located in an underground passage inside the cliff below the castle. The underground, which has an equipped hospital, can normally be visited, from the headquarters you can see the French coast and the port, below, you can see the windows and air vents of the military installations in the cliff. I contemplate the magnificent view towards France behind the busiest arm of the sea in the world and I regret not being able to visit the underground, which is a landmark in the history of the heroic struggles against the Nazis.

The covid madness prevents travel, tourism, knowledge, closes museums and libraries.  I am the only tourist, some other inhabitants walk their dogs on the castle site. The employees are obliged to register on an electronic register in order to trace me in case of a covid, they do their job of tracing but do not hide the fact that they would all like to return to a normal life.

What I remember is that the Gothic castle of Henry II Plantagenet is as much a guardian lighthouse as a bridge to the continent (moreover, the oldest part of the castle is a magnificent Roman lighthouse which is very well preserved), France and England do indeed have a common history and civilisation and the Dover crossing is only closed in times of war.

I walk down gently from the cliff to the gate below. I walk along a series of high brick blocks of flats overlooking the waterfront, an interesting example of innovative social architecture after the war. An armada of lorries passes me and rushes towards the ferries already waiting at the quay. To my left the small houses blocked under the spectacular cliff, to my right the sea.

I arrive at the Port Authority building, which is also the ferry terminal. A sign indicates to the cyclists that they must continue on foot to enter the boat. The station is a large hall under the « foot passanger » sign, with a closed café, toilets and offices. It is deserted except for one man alone behind a ticket office. I show him my paid ticket on the internet. He asks me why I don’t have a car. I’m taken aback, I tell him that I’m a « football passanger ». Of course, when I took the ticket on the internet, it drew my attention to the fact that it was compulsory to indicate a car, a truck or a bicycle but I thought that the company just wanted to make more money, so I ticked « bicycle », telling myself that cycling or walking is the same after all you are obliged to leave your bicycle in the hold and you go up to the passenger part on foot! But now the man refuses me access ! He tells me that without a bike I’m not allowed to get on the boat ! That with a bike I don’t have the covid, but if I don’t have a bike I’m going to bring them the covid !

This seems totally absurd and I try to reason with him logically. What’s the importance of having a bike since anyway, as it says on the sign opposite « cyclist, get off your bike and walk to the 2 ferry bridge »? I get angry that I paid for the ticket, that they don’t give me the money back… I despair how I’m going to get home. I ask him, but who made such absurd rules, of which you are not warned anywhere because the « foot passanger » sign is always in a good place above the station entrance? The man refuses to talk to me, he doesn’t want to give me a phone number of a superior, he obviously sends me back to the internet (refer to internet sites where there is no valid information, the best parade of small chefs anno domini 2020). The only information I managed to get out of him is that it was the ferry company, DFDS, that took the decision to ban foot passengers and that this absurd ban has been in force since last March, the first lockdown covid and has never been lifted.

It is for me a surprise and a shock, I didn’t expect what looks very much like a form of border blockade. How to find a car to get through when Flixbus is still suppressed, the London TGV costs 260 Euros and the plane ticket to Paris 300 Euros? While France is right opposite, I could see the Calais coast from the top of the cliff? I leave to seek help from the real authorities – the police. I cross the road crossing and find myself in a pedestrian-free area near the border post where we are usually checked before the ferry when we travel by bus. Some policemen come out and I run to tell them about my misadventure and ask for help. They are friendly. One of the policewomen, sincerely concerned about my situation (it’s raining, it’s cold, I’m a lonely woman stuck in the port with a suitcase who can’t get on my ferry) accompanies me to talk to the man from the port authority. When he sees her there with me he is obliged to be kinder, but he doesn’t give up: « It’s the law, it’s like that because of the covid. No passengers on foot. If she has a bicycle she passes ».

The policewoman is perplexed, but she is visibly powerless. The private transport companies can refuse whoever they want and they are the ones who, as is often the case, decide on absurd pseudo covid prohibitions. I suspect that it is the French government that wants to break the cross-Channel passenger movement and that is why it has banned the cheapest pedestrian crossing. As Macron can’t do it openly, it is evading its bans from private companies who pretend to be the law, like Flixbus, which forces travellers to undergo illegal tests in Berlin, or Ryanair, which is summoned to collect health data on its passengers on behalf of the Polish Sanepid[1].

The English policewoman understands my distress. She offers me either to buy a bike on the spot (so you can pass by and keep the bike, it will be as much as a plane or TGV ticket…) or even to find a car that will take me as a hitch-hiker for the crossing, since the covid leaves cars alone… Why not a truck? Dover is full of Polish trucks and I will eventually find a helpful Polish driver who will help me. That’s an idea. I can remember my first adult trips to Europe – I hitchhiked across Europe several times in 1989, 1990, 1991 and 1992. At that time I was 18, 19, 20 and 21 years old I was a student in Warsaw I had no money to pay for bus tickets, let’s not talk about the plane which was a luxury! So I went to Warsaw-Paris every summer with truck drivers who were already transmitting information to each other via the CB. It was still a very bohemian world, without insecurity. The truck drivers were adventurous french workers who had chosen this profession to move and travel. Some of them had travelled all over the world, on long roads in Asia and Africa, they had things to tell, they were politicised. They took hitch-hikers for conviviality and conversation, so as not to fall asleep at the wheel. And they enjoyed my high-level conversation, while I was always very careful not to let the slightest flirtation settle in, while staying on the quivive. After all, I wanted to live my freedom, but even though I had done karate, I knew that a young lady alone with a man in a truck that serves as a home for the man, it could become dangerous for her. In 1991 I went to Warsaw Paris with my cousin Jeanne and we made the round trip with the same nice truck drivers. And in the summer of 1992 I hitchhiked to France for good, in a context of political and economic crisis, galloping inflation and the destruction of our social life in Poland.

In 2020, in the context of unbridled globalisation, hitch-hiking has almost disappeared and has been replaced by BlablaCar, but not for free. However, the current situation is still changing the situation. I need help, why not give it a try. Back in the central square of Dover I launch an appeal on the Facebook groups of Poles in England. I’m mainly directed to the minibus companies that make the journeys from England to Poland, but they’ve already left. Nobody leaves London before December 17th. My nice Indian cafetier points out a truck car park near the seafront. I walk down a long avenue by the seafront next to some rather expensive hotels that seem to be both open and closed – in fact they have to take in customers but take care that this is not visible from the outside. It’s cold and damp, I’m fed up with this policy that makes us tramps who have to eat and drink outside, who don’t have or go to the toilet, who don’t have or get warm. But this is only the beginning of the ordeal. My friends at Wikijustice are looking for another solution to avoid coming back to London, Calais is just across the Channel, within easy reach. There are other boat companies. But do they accept passengers without bikes? No, all of Dover is blocked. No vehicle, no passage.

I return to the shopping centre in the city centre. What if I buy a bike? But apart from cheap groceries, a clothes shop and a cosmetics drugstore, there is nothing in this small town that smells of desolation and economic stagnation. The vast tourist office in the central square is closed down. Tourists are asked not to come any more, tourism is decreed dead by the Labour municipality. Realising that buying a bike in a town I don’t know is mission impossible, I Google what looks like a large truck car park, where the drivers eat and take their obligatory breaks. I find out about a taxi that agrees to take me there. It’s 10 kilometres away in a business zone upstream from the city.

The man is an elderly local inhabitant, a philosopher. For him, the closure of the Channel to tourist passengers and the « Coronavirian » lockdown is a war waged by the opulent capital against the poor provinces. While London is having fun the regions are asphyxiated and impoverished under a covid pretext. For him there are no sick people in the region, the death toll is a lie, and those who have died had to have other diseases for which they have been very poorly treated since the privatisation of the health system. I say to him again that he is still lucky not to suffer the curfew, the total destruction of social life and the compulsory mask everywhere, including for small children, like us who suffer a lot in France. He listens to my information and wonders aloud if Macron and Johnson did not agree to oppress the little people with their « whore » of a covid… It is a very Yellow Vest opinion, he is moreover admiring of our movement and believes that we need some here…

It is an instructive and enjoyable exchange. For the modest sum of 9 Pounds he takes me to a suburb where I find myself in front of a large fenced car park where hundreds of large trucks are parked. There is a small refreshment bar where the drivers can eat, but I quickly realise that the large gate watched over by cameras and the fence bristling with spikes are more reminiscent of migrant or prisoner detention centres than a friendly stopping place. I am not mistaken. No sooner had I approached the fence than a surly white English came out of a building, ordered me to leave and threatened me with police action if I didn’t obey. He looks like a slave guard, although he is obviously a proletarian himself. I politely explain my situation to him, I just want to talk to a Polish truck driver and ask him to cross with his vehicle. I don’t want to force my way through, I ask him for help. It’s a waste of time. The man shouts at me and orders me to get out of the way, but when I insist, pointing out that I am alone and lost, he tells me to go and see if there are any Polish truck drivers further away who are not parked. Indeed some 200 meters further 3 or 4 trucks are badly parked on the side of the road swept by the winter rain.

They are all Polish. I knock on the door of the first one. A dishevelled man gets up from the back cab and opens the window. I apologise for waking him up and we start talking. He is moved by my situation. A Pole can’t leave a fellow countrywoman alone on the road with a suitcase. He struggles to find a solution for me, calls colleagues. I tell him how the English security guards chased me from the car park to the truckers. He confirms, « It’s a prison, this thing. I avoid going there, there was no more room anyway. I put myself on the side of the road and now I have a 35 pounds fine to pay ». He tells me a little bit about his life, his job. In fact, he comes from Silesia where he is a farmer, he makes up for the family’s income with road transport. « Almost all the truckers who pass through Dover are Polish, and we all transport food products. Without us the English would have nothing to eat. He has not yet been able to deliver his goods to a warehouse 100 km east of London. He’s annoyed, he doesn’t have the assurance that he will be able to deliver today. « The earliest he can deliver is 8pm and I’m back here in the night. And all his colleagues are in his case. I take his phone number and I take my leave. At least I have understood how cross-Channel trade works.

When the TVs show the hundreds of trucks blocked at the port of Dover by Macron’s decision to subject all truckers to the PCR test, when I see Polish truckers invading the highways protesting against the blockade preventing them from resting with their families at Christmas, I will think very highly of him and his colleagues. I hope I have given them words of comfort and perhaps stimulated their revolt a little.

On his advice, I return to the car park getter of the truckers who go out to ask them if they are going to sea. A Czech, Romanians leave the car park – prison, but they are going to deliver. The guard chases me away from the gate again. I start to let go, it’s pitch black, the rain is heavy and my feet are wet and frozen. I risk not the covid, but a severe chill. I decide to call my taxi. But I still have to call an English truck driver for help as my phone is no longer working in the storm that is intensifying. The guard shouts at the truck drivers in the security guard’s uniform and insults me for the third time. The time when I was negotiating my passage through the truckers’ car parks seems as far back as the Neolithic period. Today’s drivers are no longer free to move around, to live their lives, they are forced to do so. Even if I find one who says that the port cops will accept me on board? What if they make me get off and I’ve made all this effort for nothing?

---

[1]

The Polish Sanepid has been, since its foundation by the communist system, an authority controlling the hygiene of products and services and their compliance with standards and laws, such as the General Directorate of Fraud Repression. With the covid dictatorship the Sanepid became the morality and health police and obtained the right to lock people in quarantine and punish them with fines – which is totally illegal and alien to its primary mission and contrary to the Polish Constitution.

Calais Dover same fight

I am relieved when after 15 long minutes the taxi arrives. I can’t wait to leave, I decide to come back to London. I tell my story to the taxi driver who agrees with me. « Go back to London Madam, I’ll tell you what’s going on ». He is of Indian origin, he is a young man. He usually works a lot with tourists. « It’s a tourist town. I usually go to France all the time. I go to Calais, I bring customers back, they visit the town and the castle, I take them to France. Sometimes I pick up clients at Roissy airport. From the covid they do everything they can to stop people passing by. They ruin the town, the region. We need the passage to France to live. Do you know why they do this to you, forbid pedestrians to take the boat? Because a lot of people from Dover go to work in Calais in the port facilities. Or go shopping or go for a walk. It’s an hour, 45 minutes by boat, they come back and that’s how the town lives. Now it’s dead, there’s nothing, it’s misery ».

 He blames the Johnson government for the situation, so incomprehensible is it that the government knowingly decided to kill provinces that were already in bad shape. But he agrees with me that « their covid story is like a secte story, they’ve gone totally crazy with it. They want to kill us by preventing us from living, by forbidding leisure activities, outings, pubs, meetings. It’s inhuman, they want to destroy us ». And yes, it is a policy, because for him there is no disease.

But he advises me not to stay here. « Trying to buy a bike is difficult and they will do everything they can to prevent you from passing by. At the end of the summer I had to take a Frenchman with a bike in a taxi. But they refused his bike in the boat, they said his bag was too big! So the guy had to take the taxi to get through. But it’s going to cost you a lot of money because you pay the taxi on the way there and then also the return of the taxi by boat. It’s not worth it ». Indeed, the powerful of the sect in power do everything to persecute the poor, to ruin them, to plunder them and prevent them from living, even enjoying the air, to mask them, to gag them, to muzzle them, to kill them. To kill them. The world has gone mad.

We agree on this. When the taxi arrives at Dover station, the police are already in ambush. I decide to leave for London. The cops are waiting for who knows what and who on the platform. I don’t want to stagnate, I am relieved when the train arrives. I am forced to take another hotel near Saint Pancrace and return the next day by TGV. The TGV will have cost 220 Euros, I had to ask for help. I also lost a day’s work, which is heavy for me. But Julian Assange’s Freedom, which is also ours, is at this price.

I can’t not at least try to stop the persecution. Trying is believing, having faith. And only action leads to Victory. I must believe in Victory, so I will return as soon as possible for January 4th. In the meantime Wikijustice will have circulated its International Complaint to hundreds of deputies, senators, heads of state and courts of justice in many countries[1].

 « Dojdiem do Berlina » – « We will arrive in Berlin », this is how Soviet soldiers greeted each other during the war. Our Berlin is to bring down this hidden sect of powerful people who are imprisoning it and oppressing us. « Doszli ». « They have arrived. That was the slogan of Victory.

---

[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rCPKk9vdY29H_kaHjqeClvJtQ62_cw7W/view

http://monika-karbowska-liberte-pour-julian-assange.ovh/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Plainte-Wikijustice-pour-Julian-Assange.pdf

Après l’épreuve des 8 heures passées dehors le 6 janvier devant la Westminster Court, je dois me réchauffer et me reposer de longues heures dans mon hôtel pour me remettre de ma déception de ne pas avoir vu Julian Assange libre ni de l’avoir vu tout court. Comme toujours j’ai l’impression qu’il suffit de le voir pour ouvrir les portes de ces cages factices et de le libérer. C’est encore plus rageant aujourd’hui alors qu’il est JURIDIQUEMENT libre et ne devrait PAS être enfermé. Je ne me résouds pas à quitter Londres car je garde toujours l’espoir d’un miracle, d’un retournement de situation. Après tout les policiers de la MET ont bien expliqué qu’Assange était en quelque sorte un captif privé, un masque de fer embastillé par des décideurs politiques sans que les libertés et droits propres à une démocratie soient respectées. Mais aujourd’hui nous sommes des peuples entiers à voir nos Droits remis en cause massivement par le pouvoir politique et nous ne nous défendons que mollement « dans l’espoir que ça s’arrête » !

Le lendemain je descends discuter dans les cafés du Norfolk place. La voisine du Frontline Club, au Panache Café, écoute ma déception malgré tous mes efforts de la veille et me dit avoir justement vu Vaughan Smith le soir même entrer dans son club. Elle lui avait dit « vous devez être triste que votre ami n’a pas été libéré », Vaughan Smith lui aurait répondu, énigmatique « Nous ne verrons bientôt » . Il y a-t-il des négociations secrètes pour la libération de Julian Assange conditionnés à son accord à quelques arrangement qu’il refusait jusqu’à présent ? Peut-être.

J’ai très envie de filer sur une côté anglaise au bord de la mer passer quelques jours au calme. Mais le gouvernement a actionné les interdictions covidiennes et je ne suis plus si sûre de trouver un hôtel dans des endroits inconnus. Je décide d’abord de faire un tour dans le centre-ville, le Hyde Park et le quartier Kensingnton et Knightsbridge. Le 7 janvier l’ambiance dans cette partie de Londres est étrange. Une partie de la population obéit à la peur de l’épidémie, ne sort plus que pour faire des courses alimentaires et porte le masque. Une autre partie refuse de se plier aux injonctions de la classe politique et manifeste sa désapprobation simplement en marchand. Les rues sont parcourues par de nombreuses voitures de la MET qui n’arrêtent personne, mais créent une ambiance pesante. Les habitants de Londres se concentrent dans le parc comme s’ils s’y donnaient rendez-vous. Le temps est très froid et ensoleillé, les gens marchent, courent, font du vélo, promènent des chiens, jouent avec leurs enfants, nourrissent des écureuils, discutent, boivent du thé, du café et des soupes chaudes vendus dans quelques pavillons à emporter. Ils se rassemblent imperticiblement et dans le parc la police qui patrouille sans arrêt ne réussit pas à leur faire peur. On a l’impression de participer à une protestation aussi silencieuse que déterminée. Je suis le mouvement et je suis contente de profiter de l’air sans masque.

De retour à mon hôtel, je prépare mon départ en France mais je réfléchis déjà à mon futur retour à Londres. Julian Assange sera-t-il présenté tous les 28 jours pour les fameux « call over hearing » qui m’ont fait venir ici pendant 1 an et demi? Je veux vérifier ce que le droit anglais dit à ce sujet, bien qu’il soit évident que Assange est « hors droit », maintenu arbitrairement puisque libre juridiquement et physiquement toujours captif. C’est alors que je découvre sur internet que… le nom de « call over hearing » n’existe pas dans le droit britannique ! Les juges auxquels que j’ai à chaque fois posé des questions nous assuraient qu’il FALLAIT que Julian Assange comparaisse tous les 28 jours pour prolonger la détention provisoire car c’est la loi, de même que les avocats polonais n’ont pas dit la vérité. Ont manipulé la vérité. Le nom de « call over hearing » n’existe que dans le droit australien et désigne les audiences qui préparent un « planning » du procès[1]. Dans le droit britannique la détention provisoire s’appelle « remand in custody », (j’ai entendu Baraitser et les autres prononcer ce vocable plus de 15 fois) mais il n’est PAS possible de prolonger cette détention indéfiniment. Au contraire, la limite de la détention provoisoire est très clairement fixée dans la Loi, par le «Section 22 of the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985 (POA 1985 »), et le « Prosecution of Offences (CTL) Regulations 1987 » et cette limite est de… 56  ou 70 jours pour un délit jugé une Magistrate Court et 182 jours pour un crime jugé par une Crown Court ! Or, l’extradition est toujours jugée par une Magistrate Court et Assange est emprisonné depuis 20 mois, soit plus de 600 jours, 10 fois plus que la norme légale du « Custody Time Limit » (limite de la détention provisoire !)

Je suis sidérée par cette découverte et furieuse d’avoir fait si longtemps confiance aux juges et avocats et n’avoir pas vérifié directement sur les textes de Loi !

Mais le meilleur est que « si le procureur ne parvient pas à constituer le dossier d’accusation dans le cadre de cette limite de temps, l’exception au droit à la libération conditionnelle cesse de s’appliquer. L’accusé a de ce fait un droit absolu au bail, c’est-à-dire à la libération »[2] !

L’accusation peut demander une prolongation de la détention provisoire, mais ne peut pas utiliser comme argument sa propre incapacité à présenter des raisons valables d’emprisonner le citoyen. Si l’accusation ne peut amener d’éléments nouveaux dans le délai le plus court, le citoyen est relâché. Les raisons pour lesquelles l’accusation peut demander le maintien en détention sont l’absence ou la maladie de l’accusé, d’un juge ou d’un témoin important. La deuxième raison est l’existence d’une procédure annexe décidée par le tribunal s’il existe plus d’un accusé ou plus d’un délit. Je comprends maintenant à quoi servaient tous les étranges débats de « secrétariat » parsemant la procédure judiciaire contre Julian Assange. Je me rappelle de Clair Dobbin « indisponible à cette date », ou du « juge untel en voyage » ou des « spanish witnesses » (témoins espagnols) si indispensables qu’ils justifiaient à eux seuls l’emprisonnement d’Assange… Ces atermoiements servaient à avoir une raison pour prolonger la détention ![3] La fameuse « procédure espagnole » servait donc à cela également : débuter un procès parallèle pour donner à Baraitser la possibilité d’ordonner sèchement à Julian Assange « you remand in custody » chaque mois, 20 fois, de septembre 2019 à décembre 2020 ! Mais le grand problème est que les avocats de Julian Assange ont joué à fond le jeu de l’accusation, sans jamais protester contre l’emprisonnement arbitraire de leur client ! lls ont été et sont toujours totalement complices du crime !

L’unique fois ou les 28 jours s’appliquent n’est que lorsque la Public Prosecution Service (Service d’Enquête Publique, le système d’accusation) arrête la personne et a 28 jours pour constituer un dossier d’inculpation avant de devoir obligatoirement la présenter au juge. Et encore, pour pouvoir exiger de quelqu’un une détention provisoire, il faut que les accusateurs prouvent qu’il y a eu crime et que l’accusé peut effectivement se soustraire à la justice. Julian Assange n’a commis aucun crime et n’a d’ailleurs pas été accusé d’un crime lorsqu’il fut emprisonné officiellement en mai 2019 : une demande d’extradition n’est pas un crime, une intrusion informatique n’est pas un crime et interrompre sa libération sous caution n’est pas un crime non plus, tout juste une infraction pour laquelle on est sanctionné par la perte de l’argent de la caution[4].

 Dans la cas Assange tout est fait par tous les protagonistes du jeu pour créer une fausse justice parallèle avec des fausses lois et des fausses procédures, comme si les règles juridiques de la Grande Bretagne en tant que pays n’existaient pas, comme si on jugeait Assange dans un pays étranger, un Etat parallèle, un « parakratos » comme les Grecs qualifient si judicieusement leur « Etat profond ». Le Parakratos est un Etat illégal régit par l’oligarchie qui se moque de la démocratie formelle. La Grande Bretagne est régit par un « parakratos » qui se moque du « Custody Time Limit » et autres formalités des droits de l’homme dans le cas de Julian Assange[5]. D’ailleurs les mots de « Custody Time Limit » n’ont jamais été prononcés lors de ces 20 audiences auxquelles j’ai assisté, comme si justement il était entendu que pour Juliana Assange la captivité sera « no limit ».

En tout état de cause le procès doit se tenir 182 jours après l’inculpation qui doit être présentée 28 jours maximum après l’arrestation, soit 6 mois. Je comprends mieux pourquoi il était urgent que le procès à la Woolwich Court se tiennent en février et pourquoi il fallait de fumeuses « nouvelles accusations » pour remettre Assange en captivité jusqu’au second procès en septembre.

Le site de conseil aux prisonniers en Grande Bretagne est encore plus explicite quant aux droits des accusés et à la présomption d’innocence puisqu’il explique qu’il existe « une présomption en faveur du bail », la libération conditionnelle. C’est-à-dire que c’est à la puissance publique de prouver que l’accusé doit être maintenu en détention car il peut s’enfuir ou interférer dans l’enquête. Ce n’est pas au citoyen de se justifier mais bien à l’accusation. Si l’accusation ne peut prouver les mauvaises intentions de l’accusé, celui-ci est libéré automatiquement sous certaines garanties comme une adresse stable ou sa présentation régulière à la police[6].

Dans le cas d’une extradition, il est impossible à l’accusation de mener une enquête sur les intentions de l’accusé puisque par définition l’enquête se passe dans un pays étranger. Voilà pourquoi les Polonais qui fréquentent la Westminster Court sont systématiquement relâchés dès la première audience et se présentent libres au tribunal par la suite. C’est logique : si la Westminster Court devait mener des audiences de prolongation de détention provisoire tous les 28 jours pour les milliers de cas d’extraditions, l’engorgement serait tel qu’il serait impossible de mener la moindre affaire à terme. Effectivement je n’ai jamais vu un Européen de l’est figurant sur les listes de la Westminster comparaitre deux fois. Pourquoi cela ne m’a-t-il pas mis la puce à l’oreille ? Parce que les avocats et les juges m’ont menti, ont endormi ma méfiance en me faisant croire que dans le cas de Julian Assange tout était normal. Comme si Assange était un espèce de criminel monstrueux, un Elephant Man pour lequel il fallait créer des normes spéciales…

Il est évident que le Mandat d’Arrêt Européen suédois ubuesque devait comporter la case « rape » (viol) cochée en rouge, sinon il aurait été impossible d’emprisonner Julian Assange en 2010, de lui faire payer une coûteuse caution et de le maintenir presque deux ans de décembre 2010 à juin 2012 années sous bracelet électronique.

Un document du Home Office de préparation des extraditions après le Brexit et daté du 19 juin 2020 stipule même que le « Custody Time Limit » pour les extraditions est le même que pour les citoyens poursuivis dans le pays, soit 56 jours prolongeables à 70 jours, maximum 182 jours d’ici le procès[7]. Julian Assange a déjà fait le double du temps autorisé… et est toujours en captivité. La Westminster Court viole même les règles du Ministère de l’Intérieur !

D’ailleurs, ce même document précise qu’il est impossible d’arrêter un citoyen sans… mandat d’arrêt. Cela semble évident, mais il faut se rappeler qu’aucun mandat d’arrêt n’a jamais été présenté à Julian Assange ! Assange a glissé de sa « punition » pour rupture de bracelet électronique en 2012 à une captivité indéfinie sans jamais qu’aucun mandat d’arrêt ne soit produit ! En effet, c’est à l’audience du 20 septembre 2019, alors qu’il avait FINI sa peine que le mandat d’arrêt aurait dû être présenté ! Que s’était-il passé alors ? Assange n’a pas été présenté à la cour et il n’y avait aucun avocat ! Je l’ai vu moi-même puisque ce fut ma première irruption à la Westminster Court. C’est parce que nous avons sonné l’alarme que le 11 octobre 2019 les geôliers ont bien voulu nous montrer en video un Julian Assange hirsute et mal en point comme ils montreraient un Edmond Dantès après des années d’oubliettes… Inutile de préciser que les avocats d’Assange ne se sont jamais émus outre mesure de cette « formalité » qu’est l’absence d’un mandat d’arrêt comme s’ils avaient déjà acté le retour nécessaire de notre vie à l’Ancien Régime!

Je me rappelle des procès retentissants du règne de la reine Victoria, surtout celui des « petits télégraphistes », ces jeunes garçons prolétaires violés et prostitués par des artistocrates en vue : seuls des lampistes, des souteneurs intermédiaires, avaient été inculpés et condamnées[8]. Le petit-fils de la Reine Victoria, Victor Albert « Eddy » de Sachsen Cobourg Gotha, héritier du trône, avait été accusé par des témoins et des victimes d’avoir participé à ces viols. Le procès fut interrompu pour éviter que ce nom n’apparaisse en public et la police avait reçu des pressions si fortes du Palais qu’elle n’avait jamais pu mener son enquête à bien. Lorsqu’en Grande Bretagne il est impossible de citer un nom dans un procès, on peut être certain qu’il s’agit d’un membre de la famille royale au pouvoir impliqué dans une sale affaire. Les règles de la Common Law avaient été si massivement violées que la presse d’opposition a pu faire de l’affaire une arme pour contester la légitimité de la royauté. Aujourd’hui, avec le non-droit dans le procès de Julian Assange nous ne sommes décidemment pas loin de l’époque victorienne puisque même les procédures du ministère public ne s’appliquent plus. Pire, contrairement au 19 siècle, les citoyens sont chassés du tribunal et la presse triée sur le volet !

Uncovering Cleveland Street: Sexuality, Surveillance and late-Victorian Scandal – NOTCHES (notchesblog.com)

Avant de quitter le quartier je rends visite à mes relations et connaissances : pour eux il ne fait pas de doute que Julian Assange est plutôt prisonnier de « Kensington » que de Belmarsh. « Le système Kensington » c’est ainsi qu’on appelait à l’ère victorienne la mise en captivité au Palais de Kensington des descendants royaux que les rivaux voulaient empêcher de monter sur le trône. Victoria de Sachsen Coburg Gotha avait été la première victime du système lorsqu’elle a vécu une enfance austère dans ce manoir, aussi lugubre aujourd’hui sous la garde des hommes en noirs armés de mitraillettes qu’il ne l’était à l’époque où elle était surveillée par l’amant de sa mère Marie Louise von Sachsen Coburg Saalfeld, un certain Conroy. L’entourage du roi Georges IV soupçonnait ce dernier d’être le véritable père de Victoria et voulait renvoyer mère et fille en Allemagne alors que Conroy manoeuvrait pour la faire monter sur trône et devenir le régent et tuteur de celle qu’il pensait à tord être une personne malléable[9]. Contrairement à la légende dorée répandue par les médias depuis l’avènement d’Elisabeth Lyon- Bowes comme reine d’Angleterre, les successions royales ont toujours été ici le fruit d’intrigues sordides et de coups d’état. Le storytelling royal que Victoria a maitrisé à la perfection durant son long règne et qui été poursuivi par les moyens modernes de 1953 jusqu’à nos jours ne doit pas nous faire illusion. Il est temps de se pencher sur les turpitudes du pouvoir royal car est plus que probable que c’est lui et non pas le gouvernement qui emprisonne Julian Assange.

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[1] https://www.courts.qld.gov.au/courts/planning-and-environment-court/going-to-planning-and-environment-court/hearings-and-reviews

[2] « If the custody time limit expires : When the prosecution fails to comply with the defined time limit, the exceptions to the right to bail listed in Sch 1 of the Bail Act 1976 cease to apply. Therefore, in effect the accused is given an absolute right to bail »

https://www.inbrief.co.uk/court-proceedings/remand-in-custody-while-awaiting-trial/

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2012/10/part/3/chapter/4/crossheading/calculation-of-days-to-be-served/enacted?view=plain

[3] The application must be made before the expiration of the time limit. In considering whether to grant an extension the courts have regard to the criteria laid down in s 22(3) of the POA 1985. Under that provision the court must be satisfied that the need for the extension is due to any of the three specified conditions:

1. the illness or absence of the accused, a necessary witness, a judge or a magistrate;
2. the ordering by the court of separate trials in the case of two or more accused or two or more offences;
3. some other good or sufficient cause. »

https://www.inbrief.co.uk/court-proceedings/remand-in-custody-while-awaiting-trial/

[4] https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/articles/custody-and-bail

[5] https://www.sfo.gov.uk/publications/guidance-policy-and-protocols/sfo-operational-handbook/custody-time-limits/

Have you been ‘released under investigation’? The changes to police bail in the UK

https://www.bindmans.com/insight/blog/those-awaiting-trial-to-spend-longer-in-custody-the-ministry-of-justices-latest-attempt-to-tackle-the-backlog-by-extending-custody-time-limits

[6] « Bail
Unless your family member is remanded for one of the above reasons the court will remand the accused on bail  meaning they are free to leave the court but must attend on the next occasion. This is called the ‘presumption in favour of bail’.

The bail may be ‘unconditional’ or may come with a set of conditions such as they must live at a particular address, not associate with certain people or report to a police station regularly. This is known as ‘conditional bail’. If the person does not comply with the conditions they can be remanded into custody.

Serious cases
In serious cases where an individual has been charged with murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, rape or attempted rape there is no presumption in favour of bail and the individual will automatically be remanded into custody. »

https://www.gov.uk/charged-crime

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1988/jun/28/remands-in-custody-for-more-than-eight

Remand in custody | Prisoners’ Families Helpline

[7] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/extradition-in-criminal-investigation-cases

[8] La reine Victoria – Jacques de LANGLADE – Google Livres

Jacques de Langlade, « La Reine Victoria », éditions Tempus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Street_scandal

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/an-irishman-s-diary-queen-victoria-s-dad-1.2164329

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_(Vereinigtes_Königreich)

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoire_von_Sachsen-Coburg-Saalfeld

[9] https://www.historyofroyalwomen.com/the-year-of-queen-victoria-2019/the-year-of-queen-victoria-birth-of-sir-john-conroy-mo/

Mon retour à la maison et la politique anti-anglaise de la France

Il est temps de rentrer mais il n’y a pas de bus et les prix de l’Eurostar sont pharamineux. Je trouve un billet Easyjet pas trop cher. Certes, je me pose la question du test PCR que Macron a imposé aux chauffeurs routiers à Douvres et je sais que ce test est exigé des voyageurs hors Union Européenne comme par exemple de la Serbie. Mais alors il devrait être possible de faire ce test que j’abhorre à l’arrivée à Roissy. Je consulte le site de la compagnie, je veux aussi voir quel texte de loi régit cette imposition. Le Brexit est acté, un accord bilatéral régit donc les voyages des Français vers la Grande Bretagne et c’est en vertus de cet accord que la Grande Bretagne m’a laissée entrer sur son territoire sans visa le 2 janvier. Mais il n’est pas facile de trouver cet accord. Sur les sites français il est question de la quarantaine demandée par la Grande Bretagne et du formulaire que j’ai rempli. Il n’est pas mentionné ce que la France exige des ressortissants britanniques. C’est la même chose sur les sites anglais qui logiquement m’informent sur les lois, décrets, circulaires britanniques et pas français. Le médias parlent d’un accord bilatéral sur la circulation transfrontière signé le 24 décembre, veille de Noël, pour réguler le problème des camions bloqués à Douvres. Mais le texte de l’accord n’est pas publié au Journal Officiel. Il y a un vide, comme souvent maintenant que le fait du prince crée la réalité illégalement en tout arbitraire.

Quant à Easyjet, il faut déjà avoir payé son billet pour accéder aux « conditions d’accès à bord », c’est à dire au fameux Passenger Locator Card, le formulaire qui contrôle votre état de santé covid et qui est aussi illégal que les papiers que fait signer la compagnie DFDS. Comme c’est illégal de réunir des données de santé sur les gens, forcément Easyjet ne s’en vante pas et ne le publie pas en toutes lettres sur son site. Le vendredi 8 janvier je quitte  Paddington sur une note d’espoir (« on se reverra bientôt ! Ce cirque finira bien par finir ! ») et je prends le train à Victoria Station pour Gatewick, une localité située à mi-chemin entre Londres et la côte du Sud. Gatewick est un aéroport flambant neuf construit pour ces voyages tourisme et bougeotte low cost qui ne sont plus qu’un souvenir aujourd’hui alors que le 11 mars l’année dernière, ils faisaient partie de notre quotidien pour le meilleur et pour le pire. Ce qui me frappe est ce lourd silence dans les immense aérogares entièrement désertes de voyageurs et d’employés, hormis quelques agents de sécurité mutiques. Je chemine longuement dans les escaliers, les couloirs et les halls vides avant d’arriver dans un petit espace peint en orange « check-in Easy Jet ». Un agent de sécurité avec un badge Easyjet est assis derrière une guérite avant l’enregistrement des bagages. Il ne contrôle pas les passeports, mais uniquement les attestations covid Passenger Locator Card et … les tests PCR. Il refuse mon embarquement sans test PCR. Il ne veut pas entendre mes arguments que l’information n’est pas accessible sur le site de l’entreprise. Il ne veut pas entendre et  il ne comprend pas qu’exiger un test médical pour un voyage est en réalité une violation des droits de l’homme, des Constitutions, de la CEDH, de la Chartes des droits fondamentaux etc. Il n’a bien sur aucune idée qu’il n’a pas le droit d’accéder à des informations médicales sur moi car elles sont couvertes par le secret médical qui fait partie du droit à l’intégrité physique et à la vie privée.

Il est obtus, stupide, désagréable, il se croie un petit chef : la vraie mentalité de kapo que nombreux citoyens auparavant normaux endossent désormais. Il n’est même pas ému par le sort d’une femme coincée dans cet aéroport désert qui a payé son billet qu’il sait qu’Easyjet ne va jamais rembourser. (Aucun voyageur n’a été remboursé par aucune compagnie aérienne depuis le début du covid. Les boites se font faire un crédit gratuit par leurs anciens clients. Le capitalisme vorace est toujours là et Flixbus me doit déjà 400 Euros de billet de bus annulés à la dernière minute depuis 1 an). Il ne me renseigne pas, ne m’aide en rien, m’écarte comme un objet inutile pour contrôler minutieusement les papiers que lui présentent les quelques dizaines de voyageurs dociles comme des moutons qui ont peur de ne pas pouvoir rentrer à la maison sans son imprimatur.

Je m’effondre. Toute cette tension nerveuse et cette violence psychologique sont trop lourdes pour moi. Heureusement je suis soutenue par l’équipe de Wikijustice. Je demande de l’aide au Consulat de France sur le site duquel il y a vaguement une liste d’entreprises faisant le fameux test PCR, celui qui sert à nous arnaquer en France en faisant artificiellement monter le nombre de « cas » afin de permettre à Macron de nous enfermer comme du bétail à la case. C’est bien la France qui exige le test PCR de tous les voyageurs venant de Grande Bretagne, y compris des ressortissants français qui ont pourtant le droit de rentrer à la maison et devrait pouvoir effectuer le test à l’arrivée à Roissy. L’employé du consulat est gentille, mais perdue : « ah bon, Easyjet ne donne pas d’adresse ou faire le test sur son site ? Pourtant ils avaient promis ! Et à l’aéroport Gatewick il n’y a pas de labo ambulant non plus ? Pourtant les Britanniques l’avaient promis lors des négociations ? On s’est donc fait avoir… ». Et ce sont les citoyens français qui payent.

Je me déplace vers une pharmacie, la seule boutique ouverte dans l’aéroport fantôme. Ils font bien le test, mais cela dure une semaine. Le labo ambulant se trouvait il y a peu sur le parking, mais là aussi il faut prendre rendez-vous et attendre plusieurs jours le résultat. Incompatible avec un avion à pendre le jour même. La pharmacienne me conseille de payer un coûteux hôtel Hillton pour attendre le résultat du test à l’aéroport. Non, si je dois rester, car l’avion pour Paris s’est déjà envolé sans moi, je préfère revenir vers les coins plus hospitaliers comme New Heaven, Eastbourne, Brighton, Worthing sur la côte Sud.

Je suis épuisée quand je prends le train pour la côte. Mais il faut résoudre les problèmes l’un après l’autre. Je réserve le plus vite possible le même hôtel sympathique où j’avais logé à l’aller. Le gérant est un jeune très affable et en révolte contre le storytelling covidien ainsi que le lockdown qui tue son commerce et toute la vie économique et sociale de sa région. Il est heureux de me revoir et désolé par ce qui m’arrive, le prix de sa chambre est bien inférieur à ce que j’aurais pu espérer en France en Normandie. Un dernier débriefing avec mes amis de Wikijustice, un excellent fish and chips tout frais à dîner (à emporter mais fonctionnant très bien) et je tombe de sommeil sous le poids de toutes ces émotions et de ma colère contre le système.

Je suis coincée en Angleterre alors que la propagande française bat son plein contre le « variant anglais » dont les habitants ici sont supposés mourir en masse. Ce que je vois ne correspond pas du tout à ce scénario. Je vois des villes ou les gens sortent collectivement dans les rues, les parcs et les plages, font du sport, se rencontrent, mangent dehors autant que faire se peut pour encourager les commerces qui leurs sont chers. Ils n’ont pas du tout l’air terrorisés par une maladie. Pour eux c’est de la politique. Ils ne comprennent pas pourquoi le gouvernement les persécute ainsi, mais ils n’ont pas l’intention de mourir. Lorsque nous discutons plus longuement, ils admettent que leur gouvernement est miné par les mafias et réseaux internationaux qui ont des intérêts direct dans l’installation de la dictature Covid : le National Health Administration, la Sécu anglaise a été privatisée et est dans les mains du Big Pharma, l’Imperial College of London poursuit des buts politiques qui n’ont rien à voir avec la santé publique alors que le prince Charles est directement impliqué dans le business de l’agroalimentaire mondial et ouvrira le 25 janvier le Forum Economique Mondial de Davos avec Karl Schwab, le propagateur de l’idéologie du transhumanisme et Xi Jing Ping, le dirigeant de la Chine qui  assoit ainsi son pouvoir sur une Europe en chute libre.

La musique retentit chaque soir dans les petites maisons : le quartier est habituellement un centre touristique, les artistes se produisent dans les bars et on vit de la musique, des spectacles, des bars, des pubs, des restaurants et des hôtels, des boutiques qui vendaient tout et rien. La police ne patrouille pas beaucoup mais je comprends que les gérants des pubs, les artistes et les commerçants craignent des rafles et des contrôles dans le quartier. On reste donc discrets. Une adolescente de 13 ans organise une fête d’anniversaire le samedi soir, je sonne chez ses parents par mégarde mais elle n’a pas l’air effrayée. Personne ne porte de masque, moi aussi je me sens en sécurité ici.

Mais je dois tout faire pour rentrer alors que le gouvernement FRANÇAIS me fait des obstacles illégaux ! En effet, la DUDH dit bien que chacun a le droit de quitter son pays et d’y REVENIR ! Le gouvernement n’a pas le droit de m’empêcher de rentrer chez moi ! Ce n’est pas aux Anglais de m’aider à rentrer chez moi car je ne suis pas leur citoyenne et c’est logique qu’ils s’en moquent du test illégal que mon gouvernement m’impose ! Si je dois faire une quarantaine cela doit être fait dans mon pays à mon arrivée sur le sol français !

Le problème et le sel de toute l’affaire est qu’il est… très difficile de faire un test PCR ici car les Anglais ne le font tout simplement pas ! Déjà l’information n’est pas facilement disponible, il faut réserver le test sur internet. Un de mes contacts me met en garde : il est Grec et sa tante est coincée depuis 10 jours en Angleterre sans pouvoir rentrer en Grèce à cause de ce maudit test que maintenant de nombreux pays de l’UE exigent des voyageurs venus des Iles Britanniques. Elle a réservé le test sur internet par deux fois mais les résultats mettent 4 jours à arriver, or le test doit être daté de moins de 72 heures avant le départ. A chaque fois les 72 heures étaient dépassés et elle a ainsi perdu l’argent des tests et des billets d’avion! Je dois donc trouver un endroit où faire le test physiquement, d’autant plus que je ne me vois pas tripatouiller mon nez toute seule avec le prélèvement maison fourni en kit comme le veut le test « par internet ». Déjà que je sais que ce prélèvement est douloureux et tout sauf anodin car il touche des centres nerveux très sensibles et vitaux dans les voies respiratoires..…

Samedi matin 9 janvier je me mets en quête du test. Je me dirige vers une grande pharmacie Boots qui figure sur les listes officielles des gouvernements anglais et français. Leur réponse à ma question: Non ce n’est pas vrai, on ne fait pas de test Covid ici. Peut-être en banlieue, dans une localité à 30 km d’ici où je dois aller en train. J’essaye dans une autre grande pharmacie mais personne n’a l’air là non plus de se soucier des tests. Je me mets à regretter décembre quand la pharmacie de Paddington en face l’Imperial College of London affichait « here covid test » et personne ne s’y bousculait… J’aurais dû peut être faire le test à Londres ? Mais malgré le storytelling alarmiste des médias, il n’y avait pas beaucoup d’ambulances autour du St Marys Hospital et plus aucune affiche sur les tests.

En désespoir de cause, dans une boutique de cosmétiques ou je fais quelques emplettes je questionne la jeune vendeuse : que faites-vous si vous avez des symptômes Covid. La jeune femme ouvre des yeux ronds comme si elle n’avait jamais pensé qu’on puisse avoir REELLEEMENT le Covid. Elle me dit qu’elle irait voir un médecin de quartier, mais ne ferait pas de test en priorité. Connait-elle un médecin qui pratique le test, comme certains à Londres qui se font payer très cher par les voyageurs riches devant prendre l’Eurostar ? Elle me répond que le week-end c’est difficile mais m’indique le centre médical local situé à côté de la gare.

Je comprends vite pourquoi en cas de maladie réelle, elle préférerait payer un médecin privé. Le Centre médical public est désert. J’y suis accueillie fraichement par une secrétaire revêche qui dirige les patients au téléphone vers des téléconsultations. Je vois que le refus de soigner dans le système public est aussi répandu ici qu’en Pologne ou ailleurs en Europe et que la médecine au téléphone fait aussi des ravages. Je précise que je ne suis pas malade, mais que j’ai juste besoin de ce test bidon pour pouvoir franchir la frontière française. Sa collègue est plus aimable et a pitié de moi, elle cherche une solution. Elle me donne l’adresse de deux cliniques privées dans la région ou le test peut être fait rapidement avec des résultats disponibles en 72 heures. L’une est fermée, l’autre n’est pas trop loin. Je marche 45 minutes dans de jolis quartiers victoriens alors que les habitants sortent tranquillement pour leur promenade de l’après-midi après avoir fait les courses. J’arrive devant une bâtisse moderne et luxueuse. A l’entrée se tient une jeune femme en uniforme d’hôtesse d’accueil. Après la mise du masque et du gel, je remarque des panneaux menaçants de type « stop covid, restez loin, distanciation sociale » dans le hall d’entrée qui ressemble plus à celui d’un hôtel de luxe qu’à un hôpital. Quand je rentre la jeune femme se précipite sur moi puis déchante quand elle voit que je ne suis pas une « cliente ». Non, on ne fait pas de test pour les voyages. « Mais si vous avez des symptômes covid, ou allez-vous ? » La réaction de cette femme à ma question est la même que celle de la précédente : une incompréhension totale comme si le covid n’existait pas et n’était que du discours ! Je précise : « que faites-vous si vous êtes réellement malade, vous avez une grippe ou une bronchite » ? Son visage s’éclaire un peu sous son masque : « je vais voir un généraliste libéral, et si je vais vraiment mal je vais au « emergency service » (urgences publiques) ». Mais elle n’a pas l’air terrorisée par cette éventualité.

Je n’insiste pas, je la remercie et je pars. Que faire ? Aller aux urgences publiques et les supplier de me le faire ? C’est alors qu’une amie qui soutient Assange me contacte et me propose de l’aide. Elle peut me fournir l’adresse du lieu où les Allemands font le test depuis qu’il est exigé par leurs propres autorités, mais c’est à Londres. Je prends l’adresse immédiatement mais je pars néanmoins vérifier la pharmacie Boots dans la banlieue lointaine en train. C’est fatiguant et avec le froid et le stress je suis épuisée.

Crawley est une petite ville située dans une zone industrielle et un nœud ferroviaire vers Porthmouth. En sortant de la gare je me retrouve devant des hangars modernes, un terminus de bus et un centre commercial récent. L’ambiance y est déjà beaucoup plus covidienne que sur la côte. Toutes les grandes enseignes sont fermées, seule la pharmacie Boots reste. Des jeunes trainent leur désoeuvrement dans le centre car cela devait être leur lieu de rencontre du samedi soir, mais des agents de sécurité inspectent sévèrement les masques et empêchent les clients de la pharmacie de toucher les produits dans les rayons. C’est lugubre. La préparatrice est voilée, masquée jusqu’aux orbites et cachée derrière une grosse vitre de séparation. Elle m’empêche de me baisser vers le trou en bas de la vitre afin de tendre l’oreille pour mieux l’entendre : avec le masque je ne la comprends pas. On finit par discuter par google translation interposé. Non la pharmacie ne fait aucun test covid. Elle ne comprend pas pourquoi dans le centre-ville ils m’ont dirigé ici. La seule solution ce sont les cliniques privées situés dans d’autres villes, mais elles sont fermées le week-end. Le test PCR dont Macron est si friand et avec lequel M. Drosten et sa start up ramassent un argent phénoménal est boudé par les Anglais mêmes les plus covidiens. J’ai encore fait chou blanc.

Je n’ai plus rien à faire ici dans cette région qui est comme une grande banlieue de Londres, comme l’espace entre Paris et l’Essonne, mais je ne pourrai jamais y trouver ou faire ce foutu test. Je dois trouver un lieu à Londres. Dans la petite gare un cheminot sympathique me drague gentiment en m’aidant à acheter mon billet de retour. Dès que je suis dehors j’enlève l’accoutrement du masque et j’essaye de circuler naturellement le visage découvert sur les quais. L’homme apprécie visiblement. On se comprend. Ici les gens veulent vivre contrairement à la France. En marchant vers mon hôtel je traverse le quartier des artistes, de l’artisanat et des antiquaires. J’admire quelques vitrines de bijoux, de céramique et d’affiches anciennes. Evidemment désertées et c’est désespérant. Mais un petit café est ouvert et une bonne odeur s’en échappe. La jeune propriétaire est Italienne, elle me permet de m’asseoir à table en attendant mon chocolat chaud. Elle est désolée de ne pas pouvoir me servir à manger, c’est interdit « ‘mais on espère tous que cela sera fini bientôt et on va revivre normalement ». C’est tout ce que nous souhaitons tous.

J’achète finalement à manger dans grande sandwicherie qui vend du jambon et de la viande locale à côté de mon hôtel et que je connais déjà. Ici pas de masque sur les visages et on se parle ouvertement. Le jeune serveur derrière le comptoir est suédois, il confirme que la Suède ne joue pas le jeu du Covid et ne s’en porte pas plus mal. Mais attention, tout n’est pas simple : la Suède si tolérante pour les siens se protègent des « étrangers » et exige une sévère quarantaine de chaque voyageur, même muni d’un passeport suédois. « C’est dur, je n’ai pas vu ma famille depuis un an », conclut le jeune homme pudiquement. Dans cette banlieue tout le monde est migrant et les affiches municipales annoncent même « Européens, welcome, vous êtes les bienvenus » ! Son collègue cuisinier est roumain et il est bien plus véhément : il a mon âge, a connu la dictature et a bien compris que c’est ce qui est mis en place en Occident. Il me parle du Nouvel Ordre Mondial, du projet de traçage de la vie privée des humains et de la préparation eugéniste de Pfizer vendue sous le nom de vaccin. Il me dit que forcer les gens à des expériences médicales, c’est interdit depuis les expériences des nazis dans les camps, depuis Mengele. Il me parle des camps. Il me parle de la guerre et du nazisme. Il est catastrophé par ce que l’Occident est devenu. Le migrant roumain est bien plus conscient de la gravité de la situation que le jeune Suédois, expérience historique oblige.

Le sandwich est excellent et une bonne nouvelle arrive sur mon téléphone : mon amie de Londres a réussi à prendre rendez-vous pour moi dans une pharmacie qui fait les test Covid y compris dimanche. Je dois les rappeler pour confirmer mes coordonnées. Une solution de dessine grâce à la solidarité des réseaux de soutien à Julian Assange !

Le variant anglais n’existe que dans la propagande française

Le lendemain dimanche 10 janvier je prends le train vers la gare Victoria familière. J’ai rendez-vous à 13 heures et je profite du temps devant moi pour parcourir les beaux quartiers, Knightsbridge avec le Harrods en face de l’appartement équatorien ou Julian Assange a été séquestré, puis le Kensington and Chelsea Borough, un « arrondissement royal », c’est-à-dire une commune qui dépend exclusivement du pouvoir royal et non pas du gouvernement ou d’une municipalité, comme d’ailleurs Plumstead, la commune où est située la prison Belmarsh dépend du Royal Borough de Greenwich. Tout comme en France, la mode du masque est surtout l’apanage des quartiers riches alors que les prolétaires préfèrent préserver leur capacité à respirer. A Chelsea les adultes masquent même leurs petits enfants alors que ce n’est pas obligatoire. L’ambiance est donc assez déplaisante, malgré les quelques cafés ouverts ou je peux me restaurer sans toutefois pouvoir m’asseoir ni me réchauffer.

La pharmacie Chelsea Pharmacy Medical Center est située au 61-62 Sloane Avenue. Je respire un grand coup et j’appelle mes amis avant de rentrer. Je dois d’abord m’enregistrer au comptoir et payer. 170 Euros, c’est ENORME, plus cher que le voyage de France en Angleterre et retour ! Puis une jeune secrétaire médicale m’emmène au sous-sol. J’étouffe sous mon masque FFP2 que j’ai pris exprès pour qu’on me prenne au sérieux. La clientèle du test, ce ne sont pas des gens malades, mais des habitants de ce riche quartier qui veulent effectuer des voyages, je l’entends à leurs conversations. J’explique que je suis aussi dans ce cas et que je veux juste rentrer en France, consciente que c’est le gouvernement français qui m’exige le test négatif. Et que deviendrai-je si le test découvre mes anti-corps ou des bouts de virus de l’année dernière ? De combien de cycles sera l’amplification ? La secrétaire ne sait pas. Elle m’installe dans un cabinet médical petit et sinistre malgré sa blancheur stérile.

Elle me donne deux papiers à remplir, un formulaire de type médical (est-ce que j’ai les symptômes covid, est ce que je prends des médicaments ?) avec mon adresse et un autre qui ressemble à un formulaire administratif pour le National Health Administration. Je n’ai pas le temps de tout comprendre de ces documents que déjà arrive la médecin. Elle est jeune, Indienne, très masquée et pas du tout agréable. Elle n’a pas un comportement de soignante mais plutôt de technicienne de laboratoire. Je lui explique que le covid je l’ai eu et justement je crains d’avoir un test positif pour cette raison. J’ai même amené une partie de mon dossier médical dont elle peut lire les valeurs, si elle est médecin… Mais elle est dédaigneuse, balaie mon dossier d’un revers de main, ne me laisse pas parler et ne m’écoute pas. Ce qu’elle me dit est une propagande stéréotypée sur le covid qui ne m’apprend rien. J’ai en face de moi une salariée typique du Big Pharma, froide, méthodique et autoritaire. Elle refuse de répondre à mes questions sur le nombre de cycle d’amplification du test. Elle m’assure que le test ne peut montrer que « si j’ai été en contact avec le Covid dans le mois précédent ». Bon. Est -ce qu’il détecte le variant anglais ? Car c’est ce que Macron exige de nous, Français, pour qu’on puisse revenir dans notre pays.

La femme lève les yeux au ciel et dit « Mais le variant anglais n’existe pas ! C’est le même virus » ! Je souris « donc vous confirmez que c’est le gouvernement français qui a inventé l’histoire du variant anglais » ? Son silence vaut assentiment. Ma deuxième question est encore plus délicate. Sur le premier formulaire je dois signer que je suis d’accord qu’en cas de test positif, celui-ci sera transmis au National Health Administration. Evidemment que je ne suis pas d’accord mais je veux rentrer à la maison et mon propre gouvernement me soumet au chantage…

Que se passera t-il avec moi si le test est positif ? Est-ce que je serais mise de force ici en quarantaine ? (Ce qui serait illégal ?) Si oui qui va payer pour mon séjour et pour mon manque à gagner car je ne travaillerai pas ? La femme ne sait pas vraiment, mais comme elle veut se montrer dominante, elle me dit « Je dois transmettre cette information aux autorités ». Je n’en saurai pas plus. La technicienne me place devant un lit, me dit d’enlever le masque « pour elle » et m’enfonce l’espèce de longue perche dans le nez. Cela fait diablement mal, et j’ai une pensée pour les pauvres chauffeurs routiers polonais qui se font défoncer le nez 2 à 3 fois par semaine chaque fois qu’ils livrent en Angleterre et repartent sur le continent. D’ailleurs, la blessure mettra 10 joues à cicatriser et plusieurs séquelles neurologiques vont revenir car visiblement un nerf important est touché dans les voies respiratoires. Ce test est une torture inutile et dangereuse pour la santé. Je crie, la femme n’est pas contente de mon comportement, mais je lui dis que j’ai bien souffert en mars, privée de soins et emmenée trop tard à l’hôpital à cause de la politique du lockdown.

Elle ne veut pas entendre parler de ce qu’est le vrai covid, elle place l’écouvillon dans un petit boitier qui ressemble à un test de grossesse et quitte la pièce en me disant d’attendre 10 minutes. J’appelle immédiatement mes amis car je me sens oppressée dans cette pièce au sous-sol ou je suis enfermée. Et si le test est positif, est ce que je pourrai m’enfuir d’ici ? Comment puis je être sûre que mes droits seront respectés ? Je pense alors que les camps d’expérimentation médicales sur les prisonniers dans les camps de concentrations nazis[1] étaient propres et ressemblaient à des hôpitaux de pointe de l’époque. Les prisonniers sélectionnés pouvaient penser qu’ils ont plus de chance d’y survivre que dans la misère et la saleté du camp, mais en fait la torture en blouse blanche était pareille et très peu y ont survécu.

La technicienne du labo qui se fait passer pour médecin a en tout point la mentalité adéquate. D’ailleurs quand elle revient et regarde le boitier, elle ne me dit pas « votre test est négatif », mais « vous allez pouvoir rentrer à la maison », comme si elle avait déjà intégré que mes droits basiques de vivre chez moi seront désormais subordonnés à la torture que je dois subir et elle peut m’infliger. Voilà le monde fasciste qu’ils nous mettent en place.

Je lui demande à quelle heure les résultats seront disponibles et je ne songe qu’à fuir ce lieu détestable. En fait le prélèvement est envoyé dans un véritable laboratoire qui va confirmer l’analyse e ils m’enverront le résultat par mail dans la journée. Je m’en vais sonnée mais soulagée et je veux juste me détendre pour oublier la drôle d’époque que nous vivons.

Je passe le reste de la journée à me promener dans le quartier sympathique et chic de Pimlico à observer les Londoniens continuer de braver les interdictions de sortir illégales du lockdown en sortant tous en famille et entre amis. Je prends le train le soir pour mon hôtel des artistes et mes fish and chips chaleureux du bord de mer. Le document signé « Wandsworth Medical Center » m’est envoyé par mail à minuit. Je peux prendre le bateau du matin, si DFDS m’accepte à bord. Wandsworth, encore une commune où se trouvent les prisons royales.

Retour chez la police française

Le matin est gris et humide mais je savoure mon trajet en bus de mon hôtel au port de New Heaven sur le boulevard du bord de mer. La mer est grise, verte, irisée, magnifique au pied des falaises de craie. Je retrouve le ferry qui attend les chargements et les quelques voyageurs de la petite gare maritime. Au guichet, l’employée au visage fermé met le masque en me voyant et ne veut rien regarder d’autre que le test. Elle met 10 minutes à vérifier la validité de mon papier en fouillant dans son ordinateur, puis elle accepte de me vendre un billet pour Dieppe et regarde mon passeport. Je paye 30 euros et j’attends l’embarquement qui se fera après une fouille aussi absurde que minutieuse de nos bagages par 3 agents de sécurité alors que nous ne sommes que 6 voyageurs dans un immense ferry vide – 3 adolescents qui reviennent d’un concert car ils portent des instruments de musique dont un violon, un jeune couple franco-anglais et moi.

Avant de monter dans le ferry je suis témoin d’une scène qui en dit long sur l’ambiance en Angleterre. Alors que j’attends l’embarquement, un homme affolé se précipite vers le guichet. Il demande dans un Anglais avec un fort accent d’Europe de l’Est ou faire un test covid car il veut rentrer chez lui le plus vite possible sur le continent. Je pense que c’est un chauffeur routier. La guichetière et son collègue haussent les épaules et ne veulent pas du tout l’aider. « Nous ne sommes pas le gouvernement » lui dit même la femme et l’envoyant promener. L’homme s’apprête à partir et je comprends le désespoir dans ses yeux. Je m’approche de lui et je lui demande sa nationalité. Il est Bulgare. Moitié en Russe, moitié en Anglais je lui explique comment j’ai fait le test et je prends mon téléphone pour lui donner l’adresse à Chelsea. C’est alors que les employés de DFDS, me voyant faire, rappellent l’homme et lui donnent au guichet un papier. Avant de sortir, il vient me remercier et me montre ce qu’ils lui ont donné : l’adresse d’une laboratoire dans la ville !  Est-ce qu’au départ ils ont refusé de l’aider par racisme ? Ou pour ne pas participer à la surenchère covidienne que les habitants de la région n’aiment particulièrement pas ? Je ne le saurai pas, mais l’incident laisse songeur.

Je passe 5 heures délicieuses dans le bateau à admirer le paysage, les falaises, la mer verte, à respirer du haut du dernier pont, à pleins poumons ! Le billet nous donne droit à un excellent plat du jour au restaurant du ferry. Je réalise alors, assise à la table du bar devant la mer, que c’est le seul endroit où je peux m’asseoir au restaurant, pour la première fois depuis le 14 octobre dernier… Pour une fois je suis une privilégiée !

Je suis inquiète à l’arrivée à Dieppe malgré la beauté de cette traversée. Dieppe avec ses masques sur la plage et sa folie sinistre, je n’ai plus envie de m’y attarder. Il faut encore passer par la frontière française alors que les autorités anglaises nous ont laissé sortir sans contrôle. Nous descendons du ferry emmenés par un petit bus qui nous laisse devant les guérites de la Police aux Frontières dans la gare maritime. Les trois adolescents sont récupérés par un adulte, ils doivent être du coin car les policiers ne regardent même pas leurs papiers. Je suis donc la dernière à présenter, encore une fois le test covid et mon passeport. Je suis en colère contre le contrôle illégal du test mais évidemment je en dit rien.

Deux jeunes flics de la PAF m’observent dans une attitude de bacqueux, campés sur leurs jambes et accrochés à leurs armes. L’un me lance « vous venez d’où Madame » ? « Du bateau » je réponds. « Mais d’où ? » insiste-t-il. « Le bateau vient d’Angleterre, Je n’ai pas traversé la mer à la nage » ! C’est le moment où je peux enlever le fichu masque pour le contrôle d’identité. Je me retrouve femme seule sans masque face à 5 hommes flics masqués. Mais je peux leur sourire pour désamorcer la charge. Le jeune flic n’a pas réussi à me coincer. Il veut en fait savoir ce que j’ai fait en Angleterre, ou j’étais, mais en réalité il n’a pas le droit de me faire cet interrogatoire. Ce que j’ai fait en Angleterre ne regarde que les autorités anglaises, si je suis en règle avec elles. C’est le principe de la souveraineté sur un territoire : chacun est maitre chez soi et pas chez l’autre. Il va falloir que la police française révise les principes philosophiques du droit et les textes de Loi !

L’homme continue à chercher à me piéger. « Vous avez acheté quelque chose en Angleterre » ? Il n’est pas douanier, le douanier contrôle justement mon passeport. Je ris en me tournant vers lui : « Du fish and chips surtout ! Tout est fermé ! Mais je me suis fait plaisir à passer quelques jours dans un pays où ils n’imposent pas le masque dehors ! ». Je reviens vers le douanier : « Vous savez, pour la santé, il faut respirer, sans masque ! S’oxygéner ! vous n’avez pas besoin de respirer parfois ? » Je m’enhardis : « quel âge avez-vous ? Car après 45 ans vous savez, respirer n’est plus une option, mais une nécessité ! ». Le policier est très jeune, le douanier a mon âge. Il me regarde sous son masque « Madame, tout le monde a envie de respirer ». Je réplique : « Vous avez raison. C’est dommage que le masque soit obligatoire sur une si belle plage à Dieppe. Ca ne donne pas envie de rester pour des vacances ». Le jeune a reçu sa leçon, le masque ne doit pas être un sujet tabou.

Dieppe est toujours aussi sinistre avec les passants masqués et tous les restaurants bouclés à double tour. Je ne reste pas et je me dirige vers la gare. L’employé de la SNCF exige de moi une « autorisation spéciale pour voyager », je tombe des nues. Sa collègue le reprend « non le couvre-feu est encore à 20 heures, 18 heures ça sera la semaine prochaine ». La SNCF est déjà au courant des plans de Macron contre nous. Les agents, jadis de gauche, non seulement ne s’y opposent pas alors que leur ville meure, mais devancent même le Führer dans un zèle de kapos.

Je suis triste et je voudrais repartir aussi sec. Mais pour aller où ? Si la France tombe, l’Europe entière tombera, même les Anglais comptent sur nous pour la Résistance. C’est tellement dur. Mais au moins on a réussi une bataille, Julian Assange est toujours là. Nous allons lutter pour le faire sortir et nous libérer. Nous avons été efficace, nous le seront encore. Je remercie le Ciel et mes amis pour cet espoir.

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[1] Les expériences médicales nazies | The Holocaust Encyclopedia (ushmm.org)

Expérimentation médicale nazie — Wikipédia (wikipedia.org)

Les expérimentations médicales à Auschwitz Clauberg et les femmes du bloc 10 – YouTube

Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme

Le 10 décembre 1948, les 58 États Membres qui constituaient alors l’Assemblée générale ont adopté la Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme à Paris au Palais de Chaillot (résolution 217 A (III)).
Pour commémorer son adoption, la Journée des droits de l’homme est célébrée chaque année le 10 décembre.
Ce document fondateur – traduit dans plus de 500 langues différentes – continue d’être, pour chacun d’entre nous, une source d’inspiration pour promouvoir l’exercice universel des droits de l’homme.

TÉLÉCHARGER LE  PDF

Préambule

Considérant que la reconnaissance de la dignité inhérente à tous les membres de la famille humaine et de leurs droits égaux et inaliénables constitue le fondement de la liberté, de la justice et de la paix dans le monde.

Considérant que la méconnaissance et le mépris des droits de l’homme ont conduit à des actes de barbarie qui révoltent la conscience de l’humanité et que l’avènement d’un monde où les êtres humains seront libres de parler et de croire, libérés de la terreur et de la misère, a été proclamé comme la plus haute aspiration de l’homme.

Considérant qu’il est essentiel que les droits de l’homme soient protégés par un régime de droit pour que l’homme ne soit pas contraint, en suprême recours, à la révolte contre la tyrannie et l’oppression.

Considérant qu’il est essentiel d’encourager le développement de relations amicales entre nations.

Considérant que dans la Charte les peuples des Nations Unies ont proclamé à nouveau leur foi dans les droits fondamentaux de l’homme, dans la dignité et la valeur de la personne humaine, dans l’égalité des droits des hommes et des femmes, et qu’ils se sont déclarés résolus à favoriser le progrès social et à instaurer de meilleures conditions de vie dans une liberté plus grande.

Considérant que les Etats Membres se sont engagés à assurer, en coopération avec l’Organisation des Nations Unies, le respect universel et effectif des droits de l’homme et des libertés fondamentales.

Considérant qu’une conception commune de ces droits et libertés est de la plus haute importance pour remplir pleinement cet engagement.

L’Assemblée générale proclame la présente Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme comme l’idéal commun à atteindre par tous les peuples et toutes les nations afin que tous les individus et tous les organes de la société, ayant cette Déclaration constamment à l’esprit, s’efforcent, par l’enseignement et l’éducation, de développer le respect de ces droits et libertés et d’en assurer, par des mesures progressives d’ordre national et international, la reconnaissance et l’application universelles et effectives, tant parmi les populations des Etats Membres eux-mêmes que parmi celles des territoires placés sous leur juridiction.

Article premier
 

Tous les êtres humains naissent libres et égaux en dignité et en droits. Ils sont doués de raison et de conscience et doivent agir les uns envers les autres dans un esprit de fraternité.

Article 2
 

1. Chacun peut se prévaloir de tous les droits et de toutes les libertés proclamés dans la présente Déclaration, sans distinction aucune, notamment de race, de couleur, de sexe, de langue, de religion, d’opinion politique ou de toute autre opinion, d’origine nationale ou sociale, de fortune, de naissance ou de toute autre situation.
2. De plus, il ne sera fait aucune distinction fondée sur le statut politique, juridique ou international du pays ou du territoire dont une personne est ressortissante, que ce pays ou territoire soit indépendant, sous tutelle, non autonome ou soumis à une limitation quelconque de souveraineté.

Article 3
 

Tout individu a droit à la vie, à la liberté et à la sûreté de sa personne.

Article 4
 

Nul ne sera tenu en esclavage ni en servitude; l’esclavage et la traite des esclaves sont interdits sous toutes leurs formes.

Article 5
 

Nul ne sera soumis à la torture, ni à des peines ou traitements cruels, inhumains ou dégradants.

Article 6
 

Chacun a le droit à la reconnaissance en tous lieux de sa personnalité juridique.

Article 7
 

Tous sont égaux devant la loi et ont droit sans distinction à une égale protection de la loi. Tous ont droit à une protection égale contre toute discrimination qui violerait la présente Déclaration et contre toute provocation à une telle discrimination.

Article 8
 

Toute personne a droit à un recours effectif devant les juridictions nationales compétentes contre les actes violant les droits fondamentaux qui lui sont reconnus par la constitution ou par la loi.

Article 9
 

Nul ne peut être arbitrairement arrêté, détenu ou exilé.

Article 10
 

Toute personne a droit, en pleine égalité, à ce que sa cause soit entendue équitablement et publiquement par un tribunal indépendant et impartial, qui décidera, soit de ses droits et obligations, soit du bien-fondé de toute accusation en matière pénale dirigée contre elle.

Article 11
 

1. Toute personne accusée d’un acte délictueux est présumée innocente jusqu’à ce que sa culpabilité ait été légalement établie au cours d’un procès public où toutes les garanties nécessaires à sa défense lui auront été assurées. 
2. Nul ne sera condamné pour des actions ou omissions qui, au moment où elles ont été commises, ne constituaient pas un acte délictueux d’après le droit national ou international. De même, il ne sera infligé aucune peine plus forte que celle qui était applicable au moment où l’acte délictueux a été commis.

Article 12
 

Nul ne sera l’objet d’immixtions arbitraires dans sa vie privée, sa famille, son domicile ou sa correspondance, ni d’atteintes à son honneur et à sa réputation. Toute personne a droit à la protection de la loi contre de telles immixtions ou de telles atteintes.

Article 13
 

1. Toute personne a le droit de circuler librement et de choisir sa résidence à l’intérieur d’un Etat. 
2. Toute personne a le droit de quitter tout pays, y compris le sien, et de revenir dans son pays.

Monika Karbowska

Le soir du 4 janvier après la rencontre de la Old Bailey, je cherche encore à manger dans une City déserte. Seul un restaurant japonais vend de la nourriture à emporter sous des affiches menaçantes : « ne touchez pas à ci ! Ne touchez pas à ça ! Ne rentrez pas dans le magasin si vous avez des symptômes covid ! Désinfectez-vous le mains ! » J’ai hâte de partir dans un quartier plus accueillant. Le matin lorsque je quitte l’hôtel l’impression de désolation est encore plus forte. Non seulement les bureaux, les hôtels, les appartements à louer sont vides, mais les boutiques sont fermées, interdites de travail ou carrément en faillite. Je m’arrête devant deux petits commerçants qui ne vont pas tarder à rejoindre le cimetière du capitalisme covidien : une librairie juridique située en face des Royal Courts of Justice (cours d’appel) et une boutique de vêtements masculins. Dommage car la librairie a en vitrine un ouvrage qui m’aurait bien intéressé :  son titre est « fake justice, fake law », « fausse justice, fausse loi ». Il y a sûrement dedans des éléments pour comprendre comment un faux procès peut se tenir dans une vraie cour avec un faux prisonnier mais de vrais geôliers et gardes-chiourmes. La boutique de vêtements m’émeut encore plus avec ses belles vestes de tweed si british et ses chaussettes bariolées excentriques – soldées à 70%, c’est une ambiance de fin définitive[1].

Devant les couleurs jaunes, mauves, rouges et oranges des chaussettes je me rappelles de celles qu’on avait envoyées à Julian Assange en deux colis en septembre 2019 alors qu’on cherchait à entrer en contact avec lui et qu’on pensait qu’il serait faisable de lui rendre visite. Les employés du Visitor Center de Belmarsh nous avaient conseillé de lui envoyer un colis et comme le seul colis autorisé aux prisonniers passées les 28 jours étaient des sous-vêtements et chaussettes, nous avions choisis de belles chaussettes aux couleurs les plus flamboyantes. « Il a l’air d’aimer les chaussettes » – nous nous disions en pensant à ces curieuses photos de Julian Assange en chaussettes mises en scènes par les médias. La prison Belmarsh n’a jamais réceptionné le colis qui est resté dans les arcanes mystérieuses de la Poste Royale, laquelle ne vous a jamais non plus rendu le paquet non remis au destinataire. C’est ainsi que nous avions eu les premiers sérieux doutes sur la présence de Julian Assange à Belmarsh car tous les prisonniers, mêmes les plus lourdement condamnés, peuvent y recevoir lettres, colis, visites, mail et argent.

La City est une ville fantôme mais lorsque je dépasse la limite de la commune de Westminster la situation n’est guère meilleure. Sur la grande artère commerciale Strand Street de la High Commission of Australia au métro Charing Cross près de Trafalgar Square c’est la bérézina :tous les magasins sont fermés et près d’un tiers est déjà à vendre. Le lockdown, verrouillage, fermeture, est ici comme en France une gigantesque opération de destruction artificielle de valeur capitalistique, un auto-da-fé duquel sortira un nouveau capitalisme flambant neuf, des oligopoles mondiaux surpuissants naitront sur les ruines de l’ancien monde. Mais comme dit mon ami polonais anti-covidien depuis le début, Jacek Nowakowski : le capitalisme ne participe pas à un concours de qui est le plus efficace pour sauver l’humanité. Le capitalisme détruit l’humanité pour le bénéfice d’une poignée de puissants, il est la destruction même comme il a si bien su le montrer au 20 siècle. Celui qui ne voit pas que le covid est une opération de destruction, une guerre économique sans merci sur le dos des peuples doit impérativement cesser de croire qu’il fait de la politique et retourner cultiver son jardin.

Demain ces magasins n’existeront plus, mais il y aura autre chose, comme toujours, ce qui satisfera l’élite possédante du moment. Quant à nos vies perdues, notre culture en miettes, ce n’est pas l’affaire des capitalistes, comme me l’expliquaient doctement les thuriféraires de la « destruction créatrice » payés par les fondations américaines à Varsovie lors de l’anéantissement par stratégie du choc de la Pologne Populaire, de ma culture et de ma base sociale et politique en 1991. Celui qui est plus fort a raison, car il est le plus fort. CQFD.

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[1]Lipman&Sons, London’s menswear specialists for hire or purchase (lipmanandsons.co.uk

Paddington dans le lockdown

Je rejoins Paddington le plus vite possible car le bruit court dans les médias français que le procès peut avoir lieu cet après-midi au tribunal Westminster. Mon hôtel est toujours dans le même pâté de maison proche de Norfolk Place et du Frontline Club. Ses propriétaires chypriotes seront très gentils et vont me faciliter le séjour sans demander d’attestation covidienne. Peut-être participent-ils à la résistance du quartier contre le lockdown. A Paddington de nombreux commerces sont ouverts, même si les restaurants n’ont que peu de clients et que la vente à emporter est contraignante et ne rapporte que peu. Le Frontline Club avec son restaurant bio de luxe est fermé, mais mon Fish and Chips yougoslave et mon drugstore cosmétique travaillent normalement. Les restaurants et cafés chichas autour du consulat marocain rassemblent toujours leur clientèle même si une certaine lourdeur dans l’air est présente, due à un nombre croissant de promeneur masqués, enfants compris. Comme le masque n’est pas obligatoire, on comprend qu’ils ont sincèrement peur de la maladie.

La Westminster Court travaille aussi à plein régime comme un jour normal. Je longe l’ancienne maternité pour femmes pauvres appartenant à la Church Army qui jouxte le bâtiment et partage ses sous-sols avec la cour. Commencés en octobre, les grands travaux se sont mus en une énorme opération de désamiantage et les palissades empiètent sur l’esplanade devant l’entrée des bureaux du tribunal. Je rentre dans le tribunal sans encombre et je parcours les couloirs en inspectant les listes des justiciables. Pas de Julian Assange, mais bien une cinquantaine d’Européens de l’est, soit en extradition, soit jugés pour des délits mineurs. Ils sont répartis sur les 3 étages de l’immeuble dans les salle de 1 à 10. Les couloirs d’attente sont remplis d’hommes, de femmes et d’enfants, il y a bien entre 150 et 200 personnes dans le bâtiment de la Westminster Magistrate Court ce 5 janvier 2021 à 14 heures. Et ce détail aura de l’importance le lendemain.

Je reconnais le visage de certains procureurs, avocats et greffiers. Un des ministère public qui le plus poursuit les migrants d’Europe de l’Est  est le Public Authority Transport – des amendes à payer sans doute, peut-être pour défaut de masque. Malheureusement au deuxième étage je croise une des agente de sécurité black qui officie souvent pendant « le cas Assange » et qui est plus sévère que les autres. Hélas, elle me reconnait aussi et à son regard je comprends que ce n’est pas bon pour moi. Elle va certainement communiquer aux autorités que je suis déjà là, la Franco-Polonaise assidue du procès Assange. Je n’avais pas les moyens de l’éviter et avec mon chapeau et mon manteau je suis plus que reconnaissable.

Je demande à la jeune secrétaire voilée du guichet si c’est bien demain ici l’audience « application for bail » de Julian Assange. Elle part s’informer dans le bureau, alors que normalement tout devrait être écrit sur son ordinateur. Assange est un cas à part qui n’est pas inscrit sur les registres, visiblement. Elle ressort pour me dire « oui, c’est bien demain, 10 heures ». Je peux le communiquer à tout le monde sur Facebook, il faut donner l’information la plus fiable possible.

Je peux alors partir manger un bon repas et discuter dans les cafés du coin ou j’apprends beaucoup de choses. Nous discutons de la situation dans nos pays, les Londoniens se montrent préoccupés par la violence sévissant en France. Chez eux la peur est plutôt économique, car malgré les interdictions édictées par le gouvernement ils n’ont pas l’air d’avoir peur de la police, mais plutôt de perdre leur moyens de subsistance, le quartier étant désert alors qu’il vivait du tourisme. Une gérante m’explique que l’aide de l’Etat se résume aux paiements de quelques factures alors qu’il faut pouvoir se nourrir et payer les crédits de l’appartement ou le loyer. Un propriétaire d’un café d’habitués me raconte que les gens ont peur d’aller à l’hôpital. En effet, même dans une institution aussi vénérable que le St Marys Hospital ou Fleming a découvert la pénicilline en 1947 et ou seraient née les enfants et les petits enfants royaux de Diana Spencer, il y a eu deux cas de personnes de 60 ans entrées pour des affections bénignes, décédés dans la nuit et estampillés immédiatement « morts covid » » sans que les familles puissent sauver leur proche ni se défendre. Le même scénario de politique criminelle est mis partout en place qui sème la terreur et conduit à la défiance face aux institutions de santé les plus établies.

Pour bien me préparer à l’épreuve d’endurance du lendemain, je m’achète pour le petit déjeuner une belle boite de dattes et du lait de chamelle chez un sympathique épicier marocain ouvert tard dans la nuit.

L’épreuve de la bataille : storytellers, milice privée et polices diverses

Je pars à 5h30 et j’arrive en 5 minutes. Et je déchante. A 5h35 Greekemmy et ses acolytes sont déjà devant la porte assis sur des chaises longues et munis de termos de boissons chaudes. Ils y ont peut-être passé la nuit, ce que je ne peux me permettre pour des raisons de santé, il fait bien trop froid. Je ne peux pas non plus apporter de matériel de camping, car il sera refusé dans la cour tandis qu’eux peuvent le laisser à leurs collaborateurs. De plus si la police me cherche noise je serai en tord en tant qu’étrangère. Greekemmy et Deepa dorment emmitouflées dans leurs vestes, deux jeunes hommes discutent devant la porte avec un de leur amis plus âgé. Derrière  elles Sabine et son fils me saluent : Arrivée à 4 heures, tout le monde était déjà là, elle est bonne sixième dans la file. Je n’avais aucune chance d’être première aujourd’hui.  Mais je m’installe vaillamment derrière Sabine avec mes dattes et mon lait de chamelle et mes autres trésors à partager.

Je reste debout comme ça de 5h30 à 9 heures, trois heures et demie. Lorsqu’il pleut j’ouvre mon parapluie, je ne peux pas m’asseoir, pas bouger, pas me rapprocher trop, « social distancing » oblige. La torture. Une fille blonde est arrivée juste après moi et resquille sans ménagement en se plaçant devant la porte pour discuter avec le jeune homme le plus proche de l’entrée. Elle ressemble à ces « chiots » journalistes stipendiés par le CIJ qui hantaient les procès à la Woolwich et à la Old Bailey sans rien comprendre au sort de Julian Assange et sans vraiment s’y intéresser.

Ce n’est pas de la procédure judiciaire dont elle discute avec son pote, cela ressemble plutôt à de la  drague. Je ne suis pas contente mais je ne peux rien faire. J’ai juste l’espoir qu’avec 40 places dans la salle 1 que nous connaissons bien, même avec le Covid le plus sévère on devrait bien pouvoir être 10 à entrer… Surtout que 2 heures plus tard, nous ne sommes en réalité que 20 dans la file pour le procès d’Assange.

Ceux qui créent la foule sur la petite place sont les 200 journalistes et reporters qui installent leur lourd matériel devant sur la porte. Ils ont même des parapluies tendus au-dessus de caméra statiques posées sur des trépieds sur le trottoir. Leurs objectifs sont braqués sur l’entrée comme si les journalistes étaient certains que Julian Assange va apparaitre et qu’ils ne voulaient pas rater une seconde de son précieux discours. Je m’en ouvre à Sabine qui confirme que cela peut être un indice. Je remarque plusieurs chaines et agences russes, RT bien sûr, mais aussi Ruptly, Rossia Siegodnia 1 et Spoutnik qui nous avait contacté. C’est la première fois qu’ils sont si nombreux, à côté des anglo-saxons, français, de RTL… J’ai brusquement plein d’espoir que Julian Assange sorte libre et que je puisse lui parler enfin pour la première fois. Je suis prête à communiquer avec lui.

Cependant, notre attente dure vraiment longtemps alors que les journalistes remplissent la petite place et enregistrent tout ce qui se passe. L’ambiance change. Elle n’est plus intimiste comme nous ne rencontrions ici que les mêmes personnes. Il faut rappeler que pendant 1 an, de septembre 2019 à août 2020, l’intérêt pour Julian Assange était au plus bas. Lorsque nos actions citoyennes l’ont fait remonter de la « Dark place » (comme il le dit dans sa lettre SOS à Wikijustice) et finalement gagner une première bataille, brusquement c’est la foule de médias. Le succès a beaucoup de pères, mais ils n’ont pas été très actifs dans la lutte, j’en suis témoin ici depuis septembre 2019 ! L’ambiance est plutôt à « l’accueil de la rock star » aussi hypocrite qu’étouffant qui prévalait en juillet 2010 quand Julian Assange était mis en scène au Frontline Club pour les plus importants lancements de Wikileaks. « Parfois on ne pouvait même pas passer dans la rue, tellement il y avait de caméras. Et lui ne pouvait même pas se pencher par la fenêtre, car il était constamment poursuivi pour une photo. On était comme sur le tournage d’un film » m’a raconté un témoin oculaire vivant dans le quartier. Julian Assange, un hacker inconnu qui surgit brusquement du néant pour faire le buzz? Plutôt une personnalité déjà importante début 2010 pour le système politico-médiatique dès son lancement, comme on lance une mode dans l’industrie de la musique ou du film.

Le soleil se lève vers 8h30 et illumine un ciel gelé. Je suis frigorifiée quand tout se précipite et je manque peut-être de réactivité. Un peu avant 9 heures un groupe d’agents de sécurité arrive pour déverrouiller la porte d’entrée. Ce ne sont pas les mêmes que nous voyons d’habitude et ce ne sont pas les mêmes têtes que j’ai vues la veille. Bien sûr l’entreprise a changé, mais certains anciens de Mitie ont été repris. Aujourd’hui ce sont des jeunes vêtus d’étranges vestes fluos toutes neuves comme des ouvriers de chantiers qui prennent leur poste dans le sas devant la porte s’ouvre. Ils sont l’air bien novices pour des agents de sécurité chargés de gérer un flux important de personnes. Mais apparait alors un troisième personnage que nous avons bien connu du 11 octobre 2019 au 19 février 2020 mais que je n’avais pas revu depuis, lors des sessions de juillet, août et octobre dernier. C’est le manager de Mitie qui gérait la liste de Greekemmy en octobre 2019, qui surveillait Assange lors de l’audience de « l’instruction espagnole » salle 4 le 20 décembre 2019. C’est aussi l’homme dont Assange avait si visiblement peur quand il a comparu le 13 janvier 2020 dans le box et que nous avons pu communiquer avec lui par le regard. Le corpulent homme de type indien était alors présent l’après-midi dans la salle d’audience et nous avons bien senti que sa présence intimidait Julian Assange.

Pour toutes ces raisons et aussi parce que je ne l’ai pas vu travailler en dehors des procès Assange, je suis de plus en plus convaincue que cet homme ne travaille pas pour la cour mais pour uniquement les organisateurs de ce « procès privé », non lié en vérité au du ministère de la justice britannique.

Aujourd’hui notre homme arbore un pull bleu marine, un badge sur un cordon et un masque noir. Il se place dans l’embrasure de la porte alors que nous resserrons la file pour ne pas perdre nos places. Déjà quelques voix demandent à la jeunes fille blonde de s’écarter puisqu’arrivée après moi elle n’est que 8^ème dans la file. Elle obtempère de très mauvaise grâce. Loin derrière j’avais repéré Georgina. Cette fois elle ne devrait pas pouvoir entrer, située en si mauvaise position. Mais voilà que je la vois me saluer de loin et puis… remonter toute la queue avec un culot tranquille de celle qui sait qu’elle a raison et se placer derrière moi… Elle noue conversation avec moi, demande des nouvelles et salue Sabine. Je m’attends à des protestations des autres, mais non, personne ne bouge. J’ai encore une fois la preuve qu’elle fait partie du scénario du procès. Elle va rentrer c’est certain, quoi qu’il arrive.

Je m’astreins à rester calme alors que la pression monte. Le manager déclare (et c’est toujours aussi difficile de comprendre à travers les masques) « seulement 5 personnes pourront rentrer, 8 avec la famille ». C’est la consternation, l’affolement. Mais il y a 40 places dans la salle ! J’essaye de parlementer, on a déjà été salle 1, il le sait, c’est lui qui était là en octobre 2019 et janvier 2020 ! Mais l’homme est dur et inflexible « because the Covid ». Le Covid sert tout à fait les intérêts du système dominant en empêchant les citoyens de contrôler ce qui se passe dans les lieux publics ! Pourquoi aujourd’hui est-il impossible d’être plus de 4 dans cet immense bâtiment vide, alors que la veille j’ai bien vu 200 personnes à la fois dans ce même bâtiment de 14 à 17 heures ! Le Covid sert surtout à nous chasser du procès de Julian Assange ! D’ailleurs, ce procès semble être l’unique action à la Westminster aujourd’hui, les familles des extradés est-européens sont absentes et les avocats des autres affaires seront une poignée.

Surtout que « la famille » n’est pas là ! Nous sommes tous la famille de Julian Assange ! Le manager tient une liste avec des noms, quelqu’un lui demande pourquoi réserve-t-il des places à une famille toujours absente alors que le tribunal ouvre et que les journalistes se précipitent ? Il répond : « ce sont les avocats qui donnent le nom de la famille ». Nous avons la réponse qui est décisionnaire pour l’attribution le titre de « famille » aux différents militants ou salariés du groupe Wikileaks. Cependant, à ce moment ni Fitzgerald ni Summers ne sont présents, nous continuons de protester, eu égard aux heures passées devant cette maudite porte.

Auparavant il a toujours été possible de rentrer et la sélection était effectuée devant la salle d’audience. Entre temps Fidel Narvaez est arrivé et sans avoir fait la queue il récupère la place d’un proche de Greekemmy. Les deux jeunes hommes les premiers devant la porte, celui à la dégaine de stagiaire du CIJ ainsi que celui qui s’est présenté à moi comme comédien, entrent déjà. Greekemmy saute au cou de Deepa : elle a l’assurance de m’avoir définitivement écartée du jeu. Les deux femmes entrent avec Narvaez. Le manager laisse alors passer quelques personnes munies d’une petite carte de presse bleue. Surprise, Georgina a encore poussé tout le monde et elle se trouve devant moi. Je la vois alors montrer à l’homme une petite carte en plastique blanche barrée de deux bandes marrons. Elle travaille bien pour une institution importante, probablement gouvernementale et cette carte mystérieuse est le sésame qui lui ouvre à chaque fois les portes de ce procès.

Alors Sabine proteste, fait valoir sa qualité de « personal friend » de Julian Assange. Mais pour prouver cela il faut la présence de Fitzgerald. Nous supplions le cerbère de au moins nous laisser entrer dans l’immeuble pour aller aux toilettes car nous sommes ici debout sans bouger 4 heures par un froid glacial, une température en dessous de zéro ! Il refuse « covid oblige ». Dans le stress le fils de Sabine se met à pleurer et crier, la foule de journaliste appuie sur nous, c’est la confusion. Ce n’est qu’à cause de la présence de l’enfant que le cerbère qui faisait si peur à Assange lui permet d’aller aux toilettes. Elle rentre avec son fils mais me dira ne pas avoir pu accéder à la salle et n’avoir vu Assange qu’à travers la petite vitre de la porte.

Le « manager » en chef nous repousse sur le côté droite de la porte sans ménagement, sous prétexte de laisser entrer les quelques avocats des autres procès. Il n’a que le mot « covid » à la bouche alors qu’il n’est que trop visible qu’il n’agit pas en professionnel de la sécurité: en repoussant 25 personnes, il nous coince contre les 200 journalistes armés de leur matériel. Nous sommes pris en tenaille entre lui, le mur et la foule. Nous sommes serrés l’un contre l’autre comme au temps du procès de la Woolwich Court, en février de l’année dernière. Gérer la foule de façon aussi non professionnelle est dangereux, je le sais car j’ai exercé cette profession. Dans ce type de situation il faut au contraire créer un flux pour éviter le blocage et les mouvements de panique. Lui et les organisateurs de la rencontre sont tellement obnubilés par l’idée de ne laisser PERSONNE d’étranger au sérail voir Assange (et les négociateurs de sa libération ?) qu’ils ont décidé de faire fi des consignes de sécurité et nous refouler en nous bloquant devant la porte quitte à mettre les gens en danger, épidémie ou pas.

Je suis très en colère et j’essaye de contre-attaquer : je demande son nom à notre homme. Il sait qu’il doit me répondre, mais marmonne un son inaudible derrière son masque. J’entends quelque chose comme « Anish, Anishou » mais pas de nom de famille. Je fais un pas de plus, je lui dis que je ne comprends pas et je prends son badge dans mes mains pour le lire. Ni le nom de son entreprise ni son nom ne figure sur son badge. Il n’a qu’un simple badge visiteur. Il ne travaille donc pas pour la Westminter Court. On s’en doutait depuis longtemps qu’il n’est en réalité pas un agent de sécurité professionnel. Qui est-il et pour qui travaille t- il alors ?

L’homme n’a pas le temps de réagir que déjà la police arrive. C’est la MET, la Police Métropolitaine de Londres reconnaissable à ses damiers blancs et noirs sur les couvre-chefs et leurs chasubles fluos. D’habitude ils sont peu nombreux et plutôt paisibles. Nous avons eu rarement affaire à eux car ils ne viennent que pour gérer la circulation dans la rue et il n’y a pas eu foule à la Westminster pour Assange depuis au moins le 21 octobre 2019 ! Mais aujourd’hui 30 personnes vêtues d’uniformes tout neufs ont débarqué, munies de menottes, de matraques et de masques noirs. Le masque a en général l’effet dépersonnaliser la relation et le pouvoir de la police s’en trouve renforcée puisque nous ne sommes plus pour eux des humains avec des émotions mais des objets à gérer. Leur chef fait ouvrir à « Anushi » la deuxième porte d’entrée pour fluidifier la circulation : les journalistes s’y pressent immédiatement, font des photos du hall d’entrée, cela a comme effet d’alléger la pression sur nous qui sommes stockés à droite de la porte principale. Je suis la première de la file, tous les autres appuient sur mon dos, dont la jeune fille resquilleuse de tout à l’heure qui actionne fébrilement son appareil photo professionnel.

Mais les policiers forment un cordon pour protéger la porte d’entrée et nous repoussent encore vers la droite. Ce n’est pas non plus très professionnel de leur part car nous risquons d’être écrasés contre le mur. Je tente de résister à la pression physique et psychologique. D’abord j’essaye d’amadouer les jeunes agents de sécurité mais ils sont inexpérimentés et me font un signe que « ce n’est pas nous qui décidons ». Lorsque deux policiers imposants se posent entre la porte et moi, je suis obligée de battre un peu en retraite, mais je persévère.

Je leur dis que j’ai besoin d’aller aux toilettes, que cela fait 4 heures que j’attends dans le froid, mais l’homme me renvoie vers la gare Marylebone. Il a cependant une voix aimable et je continue le dialogue en adoucissant mon ton. Je lui dis que je représente une association de défense des droits de l’homme et que c’est curieux qu’on ne puisse pas voir Julian Assange pour témoigner du procès, de l’état du prisonnier politique… Le policier m’écoute et me dit « je vous comprends ». Alors enhardie, je déclare qu’il n’est pas normal que ce n’est pas lui qui fasse régner l’ordre dans le tribunal mais un entreprise privée. Il confirme « je n’ai pas le droit d’y entrer ». « Parce que c’est un bâtiment privé, n’est -ce pas ? » – je continue.

 « Il appartient à Prudential n’est-ce pas ? Une entreprise privée. Donc une entreprise privée peut louer des salle pour le tribunal mais aussi pour tout autre événement privé et ceci est une événement privé » ? L’homme acquiesce. Il se comporte effectivement comme on travaille dans le secteur événementiel : les agents de sécurité privés loués par les organisateurs de l’événement sécurisent et filtrent l’espace privé ou l’événement a lieu tandis que la police, en cas de forte affluence, gère logiquement l’espace public, la rue. C’est cousu de fil blanc, on est dans un film. Voilà pourquoi il n’y avait pas de covid hier lorsque siégeait le vrai tribunal Westminster Magistrate qui loue selon le cadastre ses locaux à Prudential et voilà pourquoi aujourd’hui le « covid » sert de prétexte pour m’empêcher d’entrer[1]. Les organisateurs de l’événement ne veulent que Greekemmy, Deepa et Narvez comme témoin. C’est tout. D’ailleurs Rebecca Vincent en manteau rouge se fait refouler. Un peu plus tard Elliot et Esther Shipton tenteront leur chance comme à la Old Bailey mais n’auront pas plus de succès en l’absence de John Shipton, malgré deux passeports australiens dans la main d’Esther. Ils ne sont pas aujourd’hui utiles aux organisateurs du spectacle.

A 10 heures il n’y a toujours pas de « famille » de Julian Assange et il reste en théorie 4 places. Je réessaye la négociation. Mais de derrière mon dos surgit Craig Murray, l’air perdu. « Anushi » lui permet d’entrer dans le sas en attendant d’avoir un avocat sous la main pour confirmer son autorisation de présence. Evidemment personne ne présente aucune pièce d’identité, comme d’habitude dans le cas Assange dont l’identité est aussi incertaine que celle de ses prétendus parents, fiancées, épouses et enfants. Soudain, Craig Murray, stressé, se tourne vers nous pour demander… un stylo ! La femme derrière moi lui donne le sien. Un journaliste sans stylo, je ne peux hélas pas l’aider.

Peu après 10 heures la pression des journalistes sur nous devient intense : ils photographient à qui mieux mieux Stella Morris qui s’approche de la porte d’entrée. Kristinn Harfnsson et Joseph Farell l’encadrent comme deux gardes du corps. Elle parait décontenancée et en colère de ne pas pouvoir entrer immédiatement comme une star car « Anushi » la refoule comme les autres. Il n’y a brusquement plus aucun « social distancing » – je me retrouve côte à côte avec Stella Morris devant la porte, seuls 30 centimètres nous séparent. Je peux la voir de très près alors qu’en septembre à la Old Bailey je l’ai certes remarqué avec sa robe rouge en train de deviser joyeusement avec Jennifer Robinson dans les travées de la salle 10 avant l’arrivée d’Assange le 9 septembre, mais il y avait encore 20 mètres entre nous. Alors que je suis si près d’elle, je m’aperçois que cette personne est différente de la « Stella Morris » qui fréquentait la Westminster Court le 19 e 20 décembre 2019, le 23 janvier et le 19 février 2020. Certes, depuis l’audience du 28 juillet 2020, Stella Morris porte toujours un gros masque noir ou rouge qui m’empêche de bien distinguer le bas de son visage. Mais sa taille ne trompe pas : la femme que j’ai vue ici de décembre 2019 à février 2020 ainsi qu’à la Woolwich Court la dernière semaine de février était de très petite taille, inférieure à 1,55 cm. Cette personne mesure au moins 1,60 cm car le sommet de son crâne se situe à la hauteur de mes yeux et je mesure 1, 67 centimètres. Elle a un visage plus massif, la mâchoire plus carrée, les lèvres plus épaisses et son teint est marqué par des cicatrices sur la tempe droite visibles malgré le maquillage. La femme que j’avais croisée sous le nom de Stella Morris en hiver 2019/2020 avait un menton plus pointu, un visage ovale, un teint clair sans défaut avec quelques tâches de rousseur. On aurait dit deux sœurs, celle devant moi d’ailleurs plus âgée que la précédente. Je suis déroutée, mais je constate aussi que « Stella Morris » de l’hiver précédent avait des épaules plus rondes et une poitrine plus opulente…Elle portait d’ailleurs souvent des tenues blanches alors que la Stella Morris d’après le 11 avril porte souvent des tenues rouge sombre, aujourd’hui un tailleur marron et un pull à coll roulé bordeaux. Je l’ai bien vue pendant des heures à la Woolwich Court. Certes, je n’y ai pas prêté tant d’attention puisqu’il n’était pas question à l’époque qu’elle fusse la fiancée d’Assange mais les quelques photos volées publiées ça et là m’apportent encore un élément de preuve que ce n’est peut-être pas la même personne. Je n’oublie pas non plus qu’Assange ne faisait pas non plus beaucoup d’attention à « Stella Morris » à la Woolwich Court, même s’il lui glissait des petits papiers qu’elle était chargée de transmettre deux rangées plus loin, comme à l’école, à Fitzgerald ou Summers.

En face de moi elle a un air dur et déterminé. La « Stella Morris » de l’hiver précédent n’était pas très causante, refusant de répondre à la moindre de nos questions, elle ne souriait jamais non plus, mais son visage impassible exprimait plutôt l’indifférence que l’hostilité.

Pendant notre face à face de 10 minutes, Kristinn Hrafnsson essaye de discuter avec le manager mais sa voix est à peine audible. Le trio attend donc mitraillé par les photographes jusqu’à ce qu’une jeune femme, Florence Iveson ou l’assistante de Gareth Peirce arborant un masque vert qui cache bien son identité, parlemente avec « Anushi » et finisse par les faire entrer par la deuxième porte. Je vois Stella Morris enlever sa veste marron (elle ne porte pas de manteau ni de sac comme d’habitude, comme si elle sortait directement d’un appartement proche ou avait laissé toutes ses affaires dans une voiture…) et passer le portique de sécurité.  Je décide de persévérer, une place peut toujours se libérer… Mais voilà que les policiers hommes de la MET sont remplacées par des femmes flics beaucoup moins avenantes. Les policières nous crient des ordres de dispersion à moi aux 5 militantes qui attendent toujours derrière moi. D’après ce que je comprends, comme en France la police estime que le covid leur donne le droit de suspendre la liberté de réunion et de circulation. Selon les « mesures covid », on ne devrait même pas quitter notre domicile. Les policières nous poussent vers le mur, elles se font menaçantes. Une grande blonde me prend pour cible, je lui demande de ne pas me toucher puisque le covid exige le « social distancing », et elle est prête à m’empoigner. Je me dérobe, je recule, puis je reviens vers la porte. Les fliquettes nous repoussent vers le matériel des journalistes, comme si elles assuraient la sécurité d’une personnalité importante qu’il ne faudrait pas déranger. Elles sont bien plus là pour cette raison que pour assurer l’ordre sur la voirie, car nous militantes sommes bien moins nombreuses que les journalistes et parfaitement pacifiques. Le ton monte entre certaines militantes britanniques et les policières, le droit à la liberté de circulation et la liberté d’expression se heurte ouvertement au « monde nouveau »et illégal des « mesures covid »…

J’admets la mort dans l’âme que je ne pourrais plus entrer. Si Assange est présent salle 1, la réunion a commencé et ne durera pas longtemps. Un peu avant 10 heures des photographes avaient bien couru vers l’entrée des voitures Seymour place sur le côté gauche du bâtiment dans l’espoir de faire une photo d’Assange, mais ils étaient revenus bredouilles. Il est possible que Julian Assange ait été amené dans ces lieux bien avant notre arrivée ou autrement que par l’entrée des fourgons de prisonniers. Je suis contrainte de m’organiser afin d’agir si Julian Assange sort et prononce un discours devant ces dizaines de microphones braqués sur la porte. Je dois lui transmettre notre message sur le panneau « SOS received » et nos coordonnées. Pour être visible politiquement, j’ai apporté un drapeau français et mon Gilet Jaune, que je n’ose pas néanmoins brandir mais je les tiens à la main. La fliquette blonde m’a en effet à l’œil. Je recule pour me mettre hors de sa portée et je m’assieds par terre à côté d’une jeune journaliste prête à la chasse à la photo. Elle est free-lance, je lui raconte toutes les péripéties de la lutte de Wikijustice pour la libération de Julian Assange. Elle est intéressée et prend nos coordonnées. Elle a entendu parler de l’importance du mouvement des Gilets Jaunes venus ici en octobre 2019 et à la Woolwich Court en février 2020 et elle est préoccupée par la situation politique chez nous, la dictature covid de plus en plus violente. Si les droits de l’homme tombent aux Pays des Droits de l’Homme, c’est un très mauvais signe pour le monde entier.

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[1] cadastre 179 à 185 Marylebone Road – Prudential aka Westminster Magistrate Court

Police spéciale assurant la protection des personnalités ?

Nous restons ainsi à attendre dans le froid sous la garde des flics. A 10h45 je distingue Greekemmy dans la baie vitrée au premier étage. Elle envoie des messages sur son téléphone. Immédiatement les militants qui s’était réfugiés derrière les journalistes pour échapper à la police se mettent à crier « Free Assange ». Je comprends que Julian Assange ne sortira pas. Ce n’est même plus la peine d’attendre ici. Dès que le refus de la libération est prononcé, le captif est habituellement évacué rapidement. Je partage mon analyse avec ma voisine, je reste le temps d’avoir une confirmation de la mauvaise nouvelle et je décide de me poster avec mon panneau, mon drapeau et mon Gilet Jaune à la sortie des fourgons. Au moins 30 journalistes l’ont déjà fait et ils occupent le trottoir de la rue Seymour place côté gauche du bâtiment. Mais ils ne peuvent se rapprocher de la porte cochère car un autre corps de police en barre l’accès : pas moins de 6 voitures et car de police sont garés le long du trottoir dont un grand camion de la Territorial Support Groupe de la MET. Ces policiers tout en noir paraissent encore plus durs, mais plus professionnels que les femmes de la MET. Ils se déploient en cordon dans la rue, font faire demi -tour aux voitures qui circulent et nous intiment, poliment mais fermement, l’ordre de rester sur le trottoir opposé. Leur uniformes et leurs armes ont l’air usés, ce n’est pas du fake cette fois. Ce sont des vrais policiers de protection de personnalité, exactement comme ceux qui armés de mitraillettes gardent le Palais de Kensington, ce Palais tellement lugubre qu’on se demande si ces policiers ne gardent pas des prisonniers à l’intérieur plutôt que de protéger le palais des dangers de l’extérieur…

Mon attente du véhicule censé ramener Assange en « prison » va durer plus de deux heures. La manifestation continue sur l’avenue Marylebone, deux militantes sont interpellées par les policiers de la MET qui doublent le cordon de la Territorial Support Group. Elles sont amenées vers l’entrée de l’immeuble d’habitation jouxtant la Westminster, peut être des logements de fonction car il appartient au complexe de la cour. Les femmes arrêtées crient, mais cela n’a pas l’air bien méchant, quelques minutes après je les vois blaguer avec les policiers. Une mise en scène ou du vrai ? Je ne sais pas. Les journalistes sont de plus en plus nombreux dans cette rue, se désintéressant de Stella Morris qui effectue une courte déclaration devant un parterre de plus en plus clairsemé. Sur le film que me montrera ma voisine d’attente, elle a l’air déconfite, elle s’attendait visiblement beaucoup à ce qu’un projet important pour elle aboutisse.

Quelque chose a néanmoins encore lieu parce qu’Assange ne sort toujours pas. Des négociations en haut lieu avec des personnages importants ? L’ampleur du dispositif policier inédit en ces lieux le suggère fortement. Ces policiers qui gardent la Reine ne sont pas venus pour nous contenir ni pour faire respecter les prétendus « covid rules ». Hier il n’y avait pas de règles covid, aucun policier et une foule dans le tribunal. Aujourd’hui les policiers sont venus pour protéger ceux qui effectuent une négociation. En effet aucune voiture ne sort de la Westminster-Prudential pendant 2 heures. Je n’en peux plus tellement j’ai froid et je suis épuisée. En deux heures il n’y a qu’un seul mouvement : un petit fourgon de type utilitaire rentre dans l’immeuble, la grande porte se soulève et dans les profondeurs de la Westminster on distingue deux véhicules, celui de droite garé plus profondément que celui de gauche. La voiture sort quelques minutes après, sans qu’on puisse voir qui y est assis, mais les journalistes ne bougent pas, il est peu probable que cela soit Julian Assange.

Peu avant 13 heures les policiers du Territorial Support Group quittent les lieux. Je vois leur chef communiquer avec une officière de la MET qui dirige le dispositif. Elle a en main un support rigide avec un document posé dessus, comme si elle assurait le script d’un film. Lorsque le fourgon noir des vrais policiers s’en va, le cordon de policières qui nous avaient nassées auparavant se déplace autour de la porte cochère prenant le relais des hommes en noir. La Territorial Support Group ne comportait en effet aucune femme.

Brusquement à 13h20 la porte cochère se soulève et un fourgon de prisonnier en sort. C’est la ruée des journalistes sur le véhicule qui tourne à droite en direction de Marylebone Road. Il a deux petits hublots : je me précipite aussi et je plaque mon papier sur l’un d’eux, dans l’espoir qu’Assange voit notre message, comme je l’ai fait ici même le 20 décembre 2019 et le 13 janvier 2020. A l’époque les 5 policiers présents n’étaient ici, selon leurs propres mots, que pour nous empêcher de rentrer dans le sous-sol. Mais voilà qu’à peine ai-je eu le temps de faire ce geste, que la fliquette blonde agressive se précipite sur moi, m’empoigne et me tire en arrière. Elle me hurle dans l’oreille « you broke the covid rules, you’re gonna be arrested » (« vous avez rompu les lois covid, vous allez être arrêtée »). Je suis en pays étranger, je sais néanmoins que les policier anglais n’ont pas le droit d’interpeller les gens dans la rue aussi facilement qu’en France. Il n’y a pas de police nationale en Angleterre en fait, mais une multitudes de polices locales. La MET n’est que la police municipale de Londres, et même la fameuse Scotland Yard n’est pas une institution gouvernementale. Elle ne peut pas contrôler les identités des gens et ne peut agit qu’en cas de flagrant délit ou de «supposition raisonnable qu’un crime a été commis »[1]. C’est bien parce que le gouvernement n’a pas les moyens de faire respecter les obligations de masques et d’interdiction de déplacements que le maque n’est pas imposé dans la rue et que tous les « covid rules » ne sont en réalité que des « recommandations », contrairement à la police française et ses amendes terrorisantes.

Je suis secouée par la violence de cette personne, alors qu’une autre policière, plus sympathique, me crie « Ce n’était pas lui dans la voiture » !  Alors je reviens à charge, je m’approche d’elles pour leur parler. J’explique que je n’ai rien fait de mal, que je ne voulais pas arrêter la voiture mais faire passer un message, qu’Assange est libre juridiquement et devrait avoir le droit de communiquer, que ce n’est pas normal que les associations des droits de l’homme soient persona non grata dans un tel procès, que la démocratie est en danger… Les deux autres femmes me regardent, j’espère qu’elles sourient derrière leur masque, surtout que j’ai enlevé le mien pour leur montrer que je ne leur suis pas hostile. La blonde agressive continue de maugréer quelques chose que je ne comprends pas, toujours arcboutée sur ses « covid rules ». A cause du masque, sans voir l’expression des visages, sans bien comprendre et être comprise, je perds beaucoup de mon efficacité diplomatique.

Je suis contrainte de m’éloigner sous la menace, j’avais déjà remis mon drapeau français et mon Gilet Jaune dans mon sac. J’en ai tellement assez que je décide de partir, pour la première fois de tout mon périple militant pour Assange, sans avoir attendu jusqu’au bout. Derrière le pâté de maison un seul petit café arabe est ouvert : nous nous y retrouvons entre militants pour enfin boire un café, certains réussissent à convaincre le propriétaire de pouvoir se réchauffer dedans. C’est tellement inhumain de rester debout dans le froid glacial dehors pendant 8 heures. Je prends mon café, je reviens vers la porte et je m’assieds par terre comme je le fais à Paris depuis septembre, depuis que je n’ai plus le choix et notre vie oscille entre celle de clochards et de bêtes de somme qui vont au travail et rentrent à l’étable le soir sous escorte policière. Comment aider Assange alors que nous-mêmes devons désormais lutter pour rester libres ?

Quelle spectaculaire dégradation de l’état des droits de l’homme en Europe en tout juste 1 an !

Il est enfin 13h35 quand l’acte final a lieu. La porte se soulève, nous voyons tous les agents de sécurité, dont « Anushi », qui ont travaillé sur l’événement, rassemblés sur le seuil du garage. Ils escortent le grand véhicule blanc qui se trouvait tout au fond du bâtiment et qui s’avance vers la sortie. Ce n’est pas un fourgon de prisonnier, les journalistes n’y prêtent donc pas attention. Au moment où le véhicule s’apprête à tourner dans la rue, les agents de sécurité privée font la passation de responsabilité à la Metropolitan Police qui forme un cordon de protection autour de lui. Alors je vois que c’est un grand minibus blanc de 30 places banalisé, sans aucune enseigne Serco ou autres entreprise liée aux prisons. Il ressemble à une véhicule du gouvernement transportant des personnalités. D’ailleurs, il est équipé d’un discret gyrophare dont la lumière bleu s’allume puis s’éteint. Les vitres du minibus sont teintées, de même que celle de la porte du passager de sorte qu’il est impossible de voir l’intérieur ni le visage du conducteur. Il est très probable que Julian Assange soit là avec des membres importants du staff, des négociateurs, des organisateurs… des chefs. Alors que le minibus tourne à gauche, direction Hyde Park, Kensington, quartiers royaux, je me retrouve seule devant lui. Je brandis mon panneau, je lève le poing. Si Assange est là, il m’a vue.

Le minibus démarre lentement, puis tourne à nouveau à droite direction Baywaters et Kensington. Les journalistes le prennent en chasse, ils ont enfin compris qu’Assange est dedans, mais c’est trop tard. L’immeuble est vide. Les policiers du MET rangent leurs affaires dans les 2 voitures restantes et partent sans façon. La porte cochère est fermée et les agents de sécurité sortiront par l’entrée des bureaux de l’autre côté. Je suis tellement fatiguée et transie de froid que je salue rapidement la jeune journaliste free-lance et je quitte les lieux pour me réfugier dans mon hôtel.  Je ne l’ai pas vu, c’était impossible, mais il m’a vue, alors je n’ai pas fait tout cela pour rien.

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[1]https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/st-s/stop-and-search/your-rights-and-responsibilities/