Julian Assange has been locked away for 13 years. In that time he could have raised a baby to teenagerhood or done a medical degree, internship, residency, GP training, and had a year unleashed on the public under his belt. In that time he could have served three terms as the Australian Prime Minister.
Assange, the world’s most famous prisoner, has people on the outside waiting for him. Not just the thousands of supporters who lobby and protest, make art and raise funds to see him freed, but a family – parents, siblings and a wife and children of his own. And his father John Shipton.
Shipton looks like he’s come straight from Central Casting. A tall, handsome, elegant and dignified gentleman playing the role of a Hollywood hero father on the path to save his son. A son unjustly imprisoned. The character would be a man who is battling a Goliath, hoping to one day reunite on home soil a family spread across the globe – to regain peace of mind and peace of heart…
Ithaca: A Fight To Free Julian Assange
But wait! There is a movie about this. John Shipton and his son Gabriel Shipton, who is the film’s producer, are in Byron Bay for a screening of Ithaca: A Fight To Free Julian Assange. But it’s no Los Angeles fairytale and it might not have a happy ending. It’s a documentary about a real son who is rotting away in Her Majesty’s Prison, Belmarsh.
Belmarsh is no walk in the park. In this real-life drama Assange is in a ‘Category A’ restriction prison, meaning that Assange is considered highly dangerous to the public and/or national security. Category A prisons house murderers, rapists, armed robbers, kidnappers, drugs and explosives smugglers, and terrorists. You won’t find the pot smokers and fraudsters here.
Shipton is engaging and humble – a sympathetic figure. Someone who you want to see win. There is no flash or glamour, just a quiet and earnest man doing his best for his child. It’s heartbreaking to watch him grapple with language when his emotions are so ragged.
A lot of support
John is immeasurably grateful for the supporters of Assange – ordinary, not-so-ordinary, people who are giving up their time and energy. The artists in particular hold a warm place in his affection. ‘They are fabulous. There is a display in Leipzig at the moment, there’s another one in Vienna, another one in Paris, and then, of course, there are the Northern Rivers locals.
‘There was a big exhibition in Cologne, in which 24 artists submitted works. There is also a website that accumulates all of these projects, and there’s Ai Weiwe; the artists are just unhesitating. Leunig for example is a supporter, his works are pure gold. Roger Waters is very committed.’
Shipton says Julian sees the artworks – he gets cards or letters, and people send news and books.
John also gets to visit Assange inside Belmarsh.
Belmarsh
Photo Kleon3.
‘It’s a maximum security jail so you have to pass through four secure portals. You’re stripped of everything – you’re not allowed to take paper in, so you’ve got to memorise everything. Then before you go into the meeting room, you get searched again and then the sniffer dogs sniff you coming in.
‘When you go into the meeting room it’s full of [high-fidelity] cameras.
‘Whenever we’re in London we visit, but mostly we just travel incessantly around the world building on the social support and then converting that into political support.’
Shipton says he saw Assange about three weeks ago and he’s not good. ‘He had a stroke about three months ago, a mini-stroke. His left eye is a bit like that [John squints]. There are reports on his health care – one formally submitted to the court by Professor [Dr Michael] Kopelman that was on his mental health.
‘There’s another report done by the United Nations rapporteur on torture, Professor Nils Melzer, who in mid-2019 took two specialist doctors with him to examine Julian in Belmarsh prison. They came to the conclusion he was suffering the effects of psychological torture.
‘It’s interesting because ALL torture aims at psychological changes. Things like not knowing where you stand, arbitrary detention.
‘If you’ll indulge me a little bit: In 1948 Herbert Vere Evatt, Australia’s first President of the United Nations, was co-presenter, along with Eleanor Roosevelt of the United States, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the first United Nations General Assembly.
‘Australia in 1973 presented to the United Nations General Assembly, for ratification, the Conventions of Asylum. All the authors of these wonderful civil artifacts of the late 20th century have seen fit to ignore their own creations.’
Shipton has strong views boys the UK justice system. ‘You know, it’s often thought that in the persecution of Julian Assange, the United Kingdom acts as proxy for the United States. Well, the Nuremberg Code specifically says that if you do it, you can’t say somebody told you to do it. They did it.
‘They disproportionately hold Julian incommunicado in a maximum security prison. They conspired with the Swedish prosecuting authority and the crown prosecuting Service of the United Kingdom, to keep Julian in the embassy.
‘By refusing to carry out an interview under mutual legal aid, which is available for interviews in England. I Swedish prosecutors can turn the TV [a screen] on they can interview Julian.
‘Julian took three cases to the federal up to the federal court level in Sweden, demanding that Sweden pursue the case, to forward the case. So between those two elements, we get a different understanding of what the United Kingdom was up to.
‘We’ve had our eyes on emails from the Crown Prosecution Service to the Swedish Prosecuting Authority. “You’re not getting cold feet on this are you? There’s more to this than a simple extradition”.
‘What can you do with these people?’
‘What can you do with these people? It’s due process abuse, procedural irregularities, the disproportion of keeping Julian – a publisher who has never done anything! He’s a remand prisoner. That is, he’s innocence. He hasn’t even got a parking fine and he’s been locked up for 13 years, and they keep him in a maximum security prison, incommunicado – that in itself is another bloody crime.
So the UK is a participant. And that Australia ignores these things, makes Australia complicit.
‘You can’t care, and not do. You don’t care, you ignore it – that is, you become complicit by ignoring, by acquiescing.
Shipton doesn’t know what he would say if he had two minutes of Joe Biden’s time. ‘I imagine if you meet Joe Biden, and then you have to dash out and I have a sauna bath or something to get the rot out of your flesh. Those people are leading the United States down a path there’s no turning back from.
‘I can’t imagine what I’d say to him. You know he has as a son that was killed in a car accident. Another one that’s gone off the rails real bad. A crackhead. He’s reportedly a Catholic, he goes to church regularly. He’s around my age – I imagine that two fathers with sons in difficulty might have a meeting point somewhere along the line, though, one would hopefully use that.’
Shipton says all successful 2022 federal election candidates had a platform, in one way or another, of bringing Julian home to Australia. ‘The Labor Party, the Greens, the teals, and the Independents, all of them – every single one. Some of the National Party, in the case of Barnaby Joyce, and some of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation – they all offered support for Julian. So it’s not an exaggeration to say that it was an Assange election. And Assange won it for those people. We expect them now to honour their promises, and act decently towards the body politic and its concerns.’
Bring him home
‘What would I say to Anthony [Albanese]? Well, I guess I would say: Demonstrate your sincerity and let us know what you have done and how we can help. Our attitude is to generate political support for the Prime Minister and his ministers to act in good faith to their previous indications and give them the backbone or stature, through our support, in order to say to the United States, “we just want Julian returned home. We don’t want to see a son of Australia, who has made an immense contribution to the worldwide understanding of how governments do things – we don’t want to see him die in an American jail. Bring him home”.’
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