We apologize to our readers for misspelling the last name of Nils Melzer. In this report, we wrote Nils Meltzer.
“In my assessment, in terms of legal process and the enormous socio-political risks associated with it, the trial of Julian Assange may well prove to be the biggest judicial scandal of our times. The merciless persecution that this man has been exposed to, and the shameless betrayal of justice and human rights demonstrated by all governments involved are beyond disgraceful – they profoundly undermine the credibility, integrity and sustainability of Western democracy and the rule of law”
Nils Meltzer, former United Nations Special Repporteur of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
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By Katia Novella Miller
REPORT. Ensnared in an interminable fake show trial, WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange is losing his health and life inside the walls of a British maximum security prison, dubbed “Britain’s Guantanamo Bay”.
After many years of persecution by the United States and its allies, Julian Assange faces a 175 year sentence if extradited to the US for revealing war crimes and human rights abuses; in other words, for doing what a real good journalist should do.
Assange supporters have highlighted the lawlessness of his London proceedings over these years, however very few people know who the British judges and politicians involved in his case are. The goal of this report is exactly to fill that gap.
Westminister Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot. Despite being married with a man deeply involved with the defense, military, intelligence, cybersicurity and arms industries, judge Emma Arbuthnot not only ruled to uphold Assange’s arrest warrant in 2018, she also presided over the US extradition proceedings against Assange until the summer of 2019.
Arbuthnot’s first ruling on Assange was made in February 2018 when Assange’s lawyers had applied to have his British arrest warrant withdrawn after the Swedish investigation into sexual assault allegations was dropped; she rejected it. Emma Arbuthnot also rejected the findings of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention — a body composed of international legal experts — that Assange was being “arbitrarily detained”. Instead, she characterised Assange’s stay in the embassy as “voluntary” and concluded Assange’s health and mental state was of minor importance. Now let’s see what has been revealed about this judge so far.
“Her husband, Lord James Arbuthnot, not only seats as a Tory in the House of Lords. He has also held high positions in the British defense industry for decades, and until 2014, was chairman of the Defense Select Committee, whose task include overseeing the British military. The crux of the matter: WikiLeaks had reportedly published numerous documents relating to activities by organizations and individuals with close professional and political connections to Lord Arbuthnot” has written the former UN Special Repporteur of Torture, Nils Melzer, in his book The Trial of Julian Assange.
Excellent investigations about the Arbuthnots have been published by Declassified UK and South African outlet Daily Maverick. Let’s see what they have uncovered.
“Lord James Arbuthnot, a former Conservative defence minister with links to the British military and intelligence establishment, was working closely with the neo-conservative Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a pressure group with a strongly anti-Assange agenda. According to the HJS’s archived web pages, Lord Arbuthnot has sat on the organisation’s “political council” for several years”, revealed Declassified UK.
“The HJS is closely aligned with the neo-conservative movement in the US and has access to the highest levels of the American government and its intelligence community. During his visit to the UK in July 2020, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo”, and former CIA director, “spoke at a rountable hosted by the HJS.”
“One of the HJS’s “international patrons” is James Woolsey, the director of the CIA from 1993-95, while one signatory to its Statement of Principles – which promote Western military power – is Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6” (the British Secret Intelligence Service).”
Furthermore, “Lord Arbuthnot was from 2016-17 a director of SC Strategy, a consultancy created by Sir John Scarlett, the former head of MI6 who had been behind the “dodgy dossier” used by Tony Blair to push for war with Iraq.”
In a 2019 report Daily Maverick revealed that judge Emma Arbuthnot’s husband “is also currently an officer of the all party parliamentary group on cybersecurity which is administered by the Information Security Group (ISG) at Royal Holloway, University of London” and “a former member of the National Security Strategy Joint Committee and the Armed Forces Bill Committee.”
“He is a paid chair of the advisory board of military corporation Thales Group, and was until earlier this year an adviser to arms company Babcock International. Both companies have major contracts with the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD).”
Declassified revealed also that Lady Arbuthnot personally received financial benefits from secretive “partner” organisations of the UK Foreign Office, called Tertulias and Tatlidil.
Tertulias is a secretive “bilateral annual forum between the UK and Spain” while Tatlidil is its Turkish-British annual forum homologous.
“Tatlidil, was established in 2011 by then prime minister David Cameron and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. It describes its objectives as “facilitating and strengthen relations between the Republic of Turkey and the United Kingdom at the level of government, diplomacy, business, academia and media”.
“Tertulias’ annual meetings between the UK and Spain have been held since 1989 but the organisation has no public presence and provides no record of events. Declassified found that its current president is Jose de Areilza, a Spanish law professor who is also a board member of the Spanish Ministry of Defence (in 2020)”
“Both Tertulias and Tatlidil are secretive gatherings about which little is known and are not obviously connected — but Declassified has discovered that the UK address of the two organisations has been the same.”
Lady Arbuthnot was similarly personally “benefited” from funding together with her husband from two sources which were exposed by WikiLeaks in its document releases. In October 2014, Lady Arbuthnot was provided with tickets worth £1,250 to the Chelsea Flower Show in London along with her husband. The tickets were provided by Bechtel Management Company Ltd, part of the major US military corporation, Bechtel, whose contracts with the UK’s Ministry of Defence include a project worth up to €215m to transform its Defence Equipment & Support Organisation, the body that buys and supports all the equipment used by the British armed forces. Another of Bechtel’s business lines is “industrial cybersecurity”, a term which is often an euphemism for cyber warfare and surveillance technology. WikiLeaks’ releases on Bechtel have shown the company’s close connections to US foreign policy.”
As if all that were not enough to evince judge Arbuthnot’s conflict of interest concerning her presiding of Assange’s proceedings, also her son, it has been revealed, is deeply involved with the defense and intelligence industries.
Alexander Arbuthnot “is the vice-president and cyber-security adviser of a firm heavily invested in a company founded by GCHQ (a British intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing intelligence information to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom) and MI5 (United Kingdom’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency) which seeks to stop data leaks. Alexander Arbuthnot’s employer, the private equity firm Vitruvian Partners, has a multimillion-pound investment in Darktrace, a cyber-security company which is also staffed by officials recruited directly from the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)” – the intelligence agencies behind the US government’s prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secret documents.
“Darktrace, which Alexander Arbuthnot describes as an “AI [artificial intelligence] based cyber-security” company, was established by members of the UK intelligence community in June 2013.”, reported Daily Maverick in November 2019. “Vitruvian’s investee Darktrace appears to have been established in response to data leaks from Chelsea Manning to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks and from NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden.”
“As Channel 4 News put it when Darktrace launched: “In the wake of the massive data leaks from Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, Darktrace is targeting corporate and government customers by promising to track down troublesome employees or intruders that are already within the firewall.”
“In November 2013, Mike Lynch, the investor initially approached with the idea of Darktrace, extolled the virtues of the company on a conference platform in London with Alec Ross, the then secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s technology adviser, and Martin Howard, GCHQ’s director of cyber policy – Ross has been personally critical of Julian Assange.”
“The conference was organised by the Cheltenham cyber-security consultancy IRM, on whose advisory board Lady Arbuthnot’s husband, Lord Arbuthnot, sat until November 2018.”
“The company quickly tapped the US intelligence community for new personnel. In July 2014, Darktrace announced the recruitment of “two senior officials from the US intelligence community”, specifically the NSA. One was Jim Penrose, who spent 17 years at the agency as an expert in data security, and served as chief of the Operational Discovery Center, helping to develop new signals intelligence capabilities – the mass surveillance programmes revealed by Edward Snowden.”
The company a year after its launch opened an office in the US.
In addition, “Alexander Arbuthnot is linked to another company concerned with countering leaks, and WikiLeaks in particular. During 2010-16 he worked at Symantec, a US company producing cyber-security and anti-data leak products which has contracts with the US government.” Alexander “Arbuthnot eventually became head of global sales at the company.”
(For additional and more detailed information on the Arbuthnots your can read the articles linked at the end of this article.)
Reportedly, in Novembre 2019 Judge Lady Arbuthnot stepped aside from directly hearing Assange’s case because of a “perception of bias,” but it was not elucidated what this related to. Arbuthnot refused to admit there was a conflict of interest and her refusal meant Assange’s defence team could not revisit her rulings. Moreover, stepping aside didn’t mean Judge Arbuthnot was not involved in Assange’s case any longer. She still had “a guiding hand in the hearing’s outcome due to the fact she held a supervisory role supporting junior judges in her jurisdiction. This included Magistrate Vanessa Baraitser”, who became the judge in charge of Assange’s case.
- We Need To Return To (The Real) Natural Law
- Tenemos que recuperar el sentido de la (verdadera) Ley Natural
- Dobbiamo recuperare il senso della (vera) Legge Naturale
District Judge Michael Snow. When Assange was grabbed from the Ecuadorian embassy by British police in April 2019, district judge Michael Snow pilloried Assange’s claims that Lady Arbuthnot was conflicted: “His assertion that he has not had a fair hearing is laughable. And his behaviour is that of a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interests,” Snow told the court.
“The ease with which Judge Snow ridiculed and insulted Assange in open court was astonishing. A year earlier, Judge Arbuthnot also openly trivalized Assange. Both judges must have been rather confident that their attitude expressed a consensus on Julian Assange that was shared not only within the British judiciary, but also within the other branches of government and the mainstream media”, wrote Nils Meltzer.
Unrespectful of due process requirements, Snow “allowed Assange no more than fifteen minutes of preparation time together with his lawyer, and then pushed through the entire hearing in less than half an hour. This is what summary trials look like everywhere in the world,” clarified Melzer.
Judge Deborah Taylor. On 1 May judge Deborah Taylor handed down the sentence: fifty weeks in prison. “According to Taylor, it was “difficult to imagine a more serious example of a bail violation”. After all, she explained, Assange’s surveillance during his years at the Ecuadorian embassy had cost the British tax payers £ 16 million. The absurdity of her reasoning is obvious. The gravity of an offense does not increase with the cost of the surveillance of the suspect. By British standards, fifty weeks in prison for a bail violation is a completely disproportionate sanction”, evinced Nils Melzer, who is also a professor and international law lawyer. After Taylor’s sentence, Assange was returned to London’s Belmarsh prison.
United Kingdom Home Secretary Sajid Javid. Declassified UK revealed that “Sajid Javid, who as home secretary in 2019 certified the initial US extradition request for Assange, attended six secretive meetings organised by a US institute which has published calls for Assange to be assassinated or taken down.”
In January 2020, Declassified UK requested information for the period when Sajid Javid was home secretary, April 2018 – July 2019, to the Home Office, which. responded: “We have carried out a thorough search and we have established that the Home Office does not hold the information that you have requested.”. Apparently, it was reluctant to disclose this information.
District Court Judge Vanessa Baraister. “In September 2020, a three-week extradition hearing was held. On January 4, UK District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser issued her decision denying the Trump administration’s request to extradite Assange to the United States to stand trial and rejecting all of Assange’s arguments. Judge Baraitser ruled that Assange would be a high risk for suicide in light of his mental state and conditions under which he would be held in U.S. prisons.” On her decision, the former UN Special Repporteur of Torture, Nils Melzer, has pointed out that Baraister’s was “a brilliantly conceived trap”
A false trial. As has been widely reported by independent media, the access to the courtroom was severely limited. To follow the hearings via the Internet was troublesome. Assange was caged behind a bulletproof glass that was placed in the back of the courtroom. He could not be heard nor hear what was said. Assange “was not allowed to receive any documents from his lawyers or to pass notes to them”.
According to Meltzer judge Baraister was tasked to pre-empting further recusal applications against judge Arbuthnot. “Given the political importance of this case – wrote Meltzer – it seems inconceivable that she would have so openly disregarded due process without instruction, consent, or acquiscence from above. The judge completely ignored the fact that, in the course of the evidential hearing, every single allegation on which she based her argument had been proved unsustainable”.
A brilliantly conceived trap, points out Nils Meltzer. With her verdict, judge Baraister “established a generic terrifying precedent with a global deterrent effect on other journalists, publicists and activists” and “laid the legal foundation for the persecution of anyone, anywhere in the world, who dared to expose the dirty secrets of the government concerned and for depriving defendants of the right to justify their actions based on public interest, an absolute duty of silence on classified evidence for state-sponsored crimes – a global lex omertà”.
Meltzer highlights also that “by refusing to extradite Assange, Baraister conveniently put the ball into the court of the United States as it was going to be up to the US government, and not Assange, to lodge an appeal and, therefore, to select the legal questions that would be reviewed by the High Court. In such a scenario the British High Court would not have to examine any of Assange’s legal objections.”
The appointment of Baraitser to preside over the Assange case remains controversial and the decision untransparent. It is very likely that Chief Magistrate Lady Emma Arbuthnot was involved in the decision to appoint Baraitser to the case in 2019.
As reported by Daily Maverick, “the chief magistrate – in this case judge Emma Arbuthnot – has a leadership responsibility for the roughly 300 district and deputy judges across England and Wales. Arbuthnot hears many of the most sensitive or complex cases in the magistrates’ courts and in particular extradition and special jurisdiction cases. Arbuthnot’s role also includes supporting and guiding district judges such as Baraitser and liaising with the senior judiciary and presiding judges on the cases they are ruling on.”
Baraitser was appointed a district judge in October 2011 based at the Chief Magistrate’s Office in London, after being admitted as a solicitor in 1994. No other information is available about her in the public domain.
A request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was sent by Declassified to the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) on 28 February 2020 requesting a list of all the cases on which Baraitser has ruled since she was appointed in 2011. Unrespectful of the deadline for a response (20 days), “two months later, an information officer responded that it could “confirm” that it held “some of the information that you have requested”. But the request was rejected since the officer claimed it was not consistent with the Constitutional Reform Act. “The judiciary is not a public body for the purposes of FOIA… and requests asking to disclose all the cases a named judge ruled on are therefore outside the scope of the FOIA,” the officer stated.”, reported Declassified.
Priti Patel, former UK home secretary. Patel signed the order to extradite Assange to the USA in June 2022. It has been uncovered by Declassified UK that she ”has also been closely involved with the Henry Jackson Society, including receiving financial benefits from the group”. She “sat alongside Lord Arbuthnot on the HJS’s political council from 2013 to 2016.”
“Soon after becoming an MP in 2010, Patel was appointed a parliamentary officer of another powerful right-wing lobby group, Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), while Lord Arbuthnot was acting as its parliamentary chairman. CFI has been described by Channel 4 as beyond doubt the most well-connected and probably the best funded of all Westminster lobbying groups”.
“In October 2019, as home secretary, Patel visited Washington DC to meet William Barr, the US Attorney General who is now in charge of the Assange case as head of the Department of Justice. Together they signed the Cloud Act which makes it easier for American and British law enforcement agencies to demand electronic data on targets as they undertake investigations.”
“On 15 May 2020, Declassified sent a further request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to the Home Office, asking for information on any phone calls or emails made or received by Priti Patel concerning the Assange case.”
The Home Office replied: “We neither confirm nor deny whether we hold any information, within the scope of your request.” It added that the reason was “to protect personal data.”
British High Court judge Jonathan Swift. After Baraister’s sentence denying Assange’s extradition to the USA, on July 5, 2021, Justice Jonathan Swift ruled that the United States could base its appeal on three of the five grounds it requested.
Just to have an idea of who Jonathan Swift is. According to Wikipedia “On 10 June 2022, Swift ruled deportation flights of unsuccessful asylum seekers in the UK to Rwanda should be allowed to proceed as there was material public interest in doing so.”
Furthermore, searching on the net I’ve found an interesting article by intelligenceuk.com listing, among other corrupt and ”fraudulent” tory judges, Jonathan Swift.
High Court Justices Timothy Holroyde and Judith Farbey. On 11 August they upheld an appeal by the US government against Justice Swift’s decision and granted the US permission to appeal Baraister’s ruling on all five grounds, including challenging the evidence on Assange’s mental health and suicide risk.
“It is arguable that more detailed and critical consideration should have been given when considering the impartiality of a expert witness’s evidence which contained misleading information and significant omissions,” said Timothy Holroyde. He referred to “a written statement by one of Assange’s expert witnesses, which failed to disclose that the WikiLeaks founder had a partner and two children when assessing the state of his mental health.”
We don’t know much about Judith Farbey. In a brief search on the Internet, I found this information that, from my point of view, says a lot about her: on October 2022 at Birmingham Civil and Family Justice Center she “refused permission for a judicial review sought by a (Christian) primary school teacher fired after voicing safeguarding concerns about her school’s affirmation of an 8-year-old trans-identified student.”
Completely unsual and against what anyone can expect in a due process, Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde, the same High Court judge who had reversed the earlier court order to bar the U.S. from appealing Julian Assange’s medical issues, presided over the substantive U.S. appeal hearing at the High Court with Judge Ian Duncan Burnett.
Judge Ian Duncan Burnett. Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett, the most senior judge in England and Walles, – overturned Baraister’s findings in December 2021, allowing the extradition of Assange to the US.
Judge Ian Duncan Burnett ”is a close personal friend of Sir Alan Duncan, who as (UK) foreign minister arranged Assange’s eviction from the Ecuadorian embassy”, wrote the British outlet Declassified UK. The connection between judge Burnett and Sir Duncan was first revealed by the Greek platform New Economy.
”The two have known each other since their student days at Oxford in the 1970s’. The have been friends since university days. Burnett and his wife attended Duncan’s birthday dinner at a members-only London club in 2017.”
”In his recently published diaries, In the Thick of It, Duncan wrote in July 2017, he has been breefing with Burnett on different topics,” wrote Declassified UK.
”Duncan served as foreign minister for Europe and the Americas from 2016-19. He was the key official in the UK government campaign to force Assange from the embassy. As minister, Duncan did not hide his opposition to Julian Assange, calling him a “miserable little worm” in parliament in March 2018.”
Duncan admitted “to arranging a Daily Mail – a British newspaper – hit piece on Assange that was published the day after the journalist’s arrest in April 2019.”
“Duncan watched UK police pulling the WikiLeaks publisher from the Ecuadorian embassy via a live-feed in the Operations Room at the top of the Foreign Office. He later admitted he was “trying to keep the smirk off [his] face”, and hosted drinks at his parliamentary office for the team involved in the eviction. Duncan then flew to Ecuador to meet then President Lenín Moreno in order to say thank you.”
“Let us acknowledge that the goal of these executioners, who discussed kidnapping and assassinating Assange, has always been his annihilation. That Assange, who is in precarious physical and psychological health…, has been condemned to death should not come as a surprise”
Chris Hedges
The only way we have to liberate and save Assange and to free ourselves from these tyrannical, corrupt and perverse Establishments and institutions which are bringing us all to the abyss, is to stand up for Assange’s freedom. The more we will be, the more our voices will be heard.
Further readings on this topic:
https://jimmysllama.com/2020/08/26/16381/
https://new-economy.gr/2022/04/20/assange-judge-orchestrated-arrest/
AUTHOR. Katia Novella Miller is an independent writer and researcher interested in topics that she finds interesting and important for the common good of humanity. Her objectives are to seek the truth and to unmask our false sense of normality and reality. For more information go to About Us, if you would like to contact Katia: katianovellamiller@protonmail.com
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On Julian Assange’s case you can read also:
What you must know about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks: The Revelations
The International Collective Persecution and Defamation of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks – Part I
The Empire vs. Julian Assange and the right of people to be informed – Part II
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