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.

[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.

[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/

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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