A new year has turned over to 2024 and we are back with a letter about Julian Assange.
We appreciate the concern and alarm by the Australian government in response to the suspended death sentence handed down by Chinese courts on Dr Yang Hengiun.
Equal concern would be appreciated for Australian citizen Julian Assange.
For many months and years journalist, publisher and Australian citizen Julian Assange hasn’t been anywhere. Least of all into a court to hear his case. Still he languishes in a cell in His Majesty’s High Security Prison Belmarsh, London UK.
In April he will have completed five years imprisonment in solitary confinement without charge. It has been described as amounting ‘to death by process’. It is certainly a long, grinding, not to say Byzantine process.
The wonder is Assange has survived this long.
Another cause for concern is the outcome of the pending hearing on 20-21 February in the UK High Court to consider Assange’s application to appeal against his extradition from the UK to the US. We stress application for appeal – not an actual appeal hearing. If the application is granted there will probably be further waiting, presumably in prison for yet another date. If an appeal is denied we expect Julian to be sent to the US within a short period of time, if not immediately, where he will face further indefinite incarceration in a US prison awaiting trial.
All of this almost five years after being hauled out of the Ecuadorian Embassy by the London Metropolitan Police ending Assange’s seven years of political asylum in the embassy.
It could be Julian’s last chance to avoid extradition.
So we continue to call on the Albanese government to follow through on its pre-election stand of ‘enough is enough’.
Surely the Australian government has enough leverage with our ally and so-called friend, given the huge amounts of public money and other resources being made available to the US military – for the US to drop the charges and allow Julian Assange to come home.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
