"Assange is in shock" | Entrevi …

From Paris

A human being is disappearing in a London prison under the judicial scheme that several liberal democracies had conceived against him: Julian Assange. A group of 28 countries that constitute the most powerful democratic group on the planet is accused of complicity in crimes against humanity: the European Union. Both cases go through the life of French lawyer Juan Branco. This young activist and polemicist is one of the lawyers of Julian Assange and also one of the two lawyers to have filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court, ICC, against the European Union for having "orchestrated both the interception and arrest of 40,000 people. migrants "fleeing Libya." The 242-page complaint accuses the European Union of "murder, torture, inhuman treatment and forced displacement" and tries to "stop migration flows to Europe at any cost, including by killing thousands of innocent civilians fleeing the area of ​​armed conflict. "Covenants with Libyan militias, abandonment of migrants at sea, the European Union's migration policy eventually created the largest open-air cemetery in the world. the planet: the Mediterranean Sea.

A lawyer for Julian Assange, a plaintiff against Europe, a defender of activists in the yellow vests movement, or a polemicist for high-voltage political essays, Juan Branco knows what he is talking about. His experience as an badistant to the ICC Prosecutor (2010-2011) is recorded in a book where he discovers the extraordinary flaws and mistakes of a court created to punish the most horrendous crimes in the world. history during the years when he directed Argentina. Luis Moreno Ocampo: The Order of the World: Criticism of the International Court (Critique of the International Criminal Court). His polemical stature is summed up in the latest published essay, among the best sellers in France: Twilight: Macron and the Oligarchs. A truth investigation (Twilight: Macron and the oligarchs: a real investigation). The book deepens the methodology of oligarchies to absorb democracy. Today, Branco expresses an alarming concern at the legal and human situation in which Julian Assange lives after withdrawing from the Ecuador Embbady in London. His French lawyer believes that Assange is in danger because "we are losing this man".

-Julian Assange, of whom you are one of the defense lawyers, is the victim of a globalized judicial vengeance and, at the same time, some sort of collusion of public opinion with the collection of Information by the so-called dominant thoughts.

-We are in a very complicated situation. Assange is in shock. After being locked in 20 square meters without access to the open air, they removed it in 45 seconds. Suddenly, there was all this violence. They arrived and caught him to put him in a high security prison built after September 11, 2001 for terrorists. To see the security drifts of our liberal democracies, this prison has a tunnel that leads directly to the Court. Now he is there, locked up 23 hours a day since April 11th. He struggles to feed himself because of the emotional shock he's undergone. We are losing this man. All his brilliant resistance to the mechanisms of oppression is about to be broken. He does not have access to anything. Only a lawyer can see him and they only give him two social visits a month. These are delusional conditions against a man who speaks only the truth, who has denounced criminals against humanity. This is no longer indignation, it is no longer crying, it is no longer rage. It's grotesque.

-A negative anti-narrative was installed in the world against him, as if he was the enemy of the democracies, the manipulator, while he was aiming to denounce his crimes.

-We have created ghosts that will come back. One of them is Assange. He will always come back for several decades to remind us of something we should never forget. Assange is like Aaron Swartz, one of those revelators of the violence that exists all the time, but which becomes intangible or invisible through the means and devices of power. Suddenly, there are fixing points that reveal everything. Assange is one of them. For years, when he judged the case of Assange, the press repeated the facts that had identified him: he was accused of being a rapist, an anti-Semite, to be an agent of the Russians. But these speeches came from the apparatuses of power for the sole purpose of delegitimizing a political dissident and they were not filtered. Our own democratic space was totally incapable of doing this filter and saying no, maybe I participate without realizing something and I should think about it a little bit. There have already been about six charges, okay, okay? There has never been this reflection. The press has lost the ability to produce its own information and repeats that made by the agencies. This is a central problem. The tension created around Assange is the tension created around the information. And information is the key to a liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is not democratic if we vote for A whereas in reality we vote for B. The nature of our political regimes is determined from there. In this, Julian Assange is an essential case to verify the reality of the nature of our political systems. Suddenly, Assange, with his radicalism, reveals the level of agreement and integration existing between the political and media system. We have become accustomed to practices that we should not accept. When someone like Assange arrives and exposes all the contradictions, there is a very strong violence. It is said then: something is happening here, it will be a rapist or an agent of the Russians. There is no thought, there is no consciousness. Assange seems to bother them and they do not understand why. It is not easy to become aware of the work of conformation that they realized with Assange. It is very difficult to resist.

Assange is still waiting for a cruel fate. They surrounded him in many places.

– The case of the Swedish rape charge does not worry us so much. He knows that he did not do it and he will prove himself. The open case in the United States is much more problematic. He is accused of something that he badumes to have been: being a journalist and revealing truthful information. There, the confrontation is harder. But we already know something about a year ago, when it was claimed that in the United States there was no persecution against Assange. There was widespread denial. He was accused of involvement in a plot to flee or become a victim of Sweden. He refused the evidence of his persecution. There was a very strong symbolic violence and torrents of suspicion because Assange had disturbed them. Now we have more clear. Paradoxically, we are happy that everything has been revealed, that we know that he is accused of espionage crimes punishable by 175 years in prison. Now we can go see the British judges and tell them that they can no longer ignore the fact that they do not send someone to the United States to serve a five-year sentence there. years of imprisonment, but in perpetuity. They will not be able to escape their responsibilities now with this hypocritical formula which allows on the one hand to respect the law and on the other hand to violate it.

– The text of denunciation on the migration policy of the European Union resulting from the crisis of the migrants in the Mediterranean is very strong: in this investigation, you point the EU for torture, complicity, crimes against the European Union. humanity, collaboration.

-We took a lot to badume the charge. These are not problems that can be treated lightly because they are very heavy charges. It took us more than two years to prepare this document for which we use specific sources. We do not give a list of people who should be charged because there are a lot of double talk on these issues. Those who have publicly made these decisions are not necessarily the ones who approved them. There are many questions about the role played by Angela Merkel, former French President Francois Hollande and current Emmanuel Macron. But there are also officials in the shadows. At the General Secretariat of the European Council and at the European Commission, officials played an important role in decision-making. There is more than complicity: there is co-responsibility in the facts and even inclusion. We show that a very complex situation started in Europe during these years.

– For you, the migration crisis is the sum of several factors that will eventually converge dramatically in the Mediterranean.

-The geopolitical crisis triggered by the war in Libya and the shortcomings of our elites, especially French, led us to seek a migration crisis. I say that this migration crisis does not start there, but that it is revealed at that time. What was hidden thanks to the secret migration management agreements signed with Colonel Kadafi and allowing to conceal the commission of crimes committed in detention camps built with the help of the European Union, was suddenly revealed . Thousands of people have tried to escape this situation caused by an authoritarian state. Added to this is a Strasbourg Court measure that ironically decided (HIRISI) to ban the return of migrants to countries where they were not safe. The European Union met with this measure and its response was to choose to stop saving people fleeing Libya by reducing rescue operations in the area where it was acting to save people. This first decision caused the death of thousands of people. And what we have shown is that it has been taken in full consciousness. We find internal documents of Frontex (European Agency for Border Guards and Coastguards) that explain the existence of information available before decisions are made. There it was clear that these measures were going to kill thousands. And despite that, it continued. Then, when the strategy did not work, the European Union made two other decisions. People who escaped from Libya preferred to risk their lives and drown rather than stay there. Then the NGOs began to save the people who were drowning. Before that, the European Union had first tried to criminalize NGOs. Subsequently, the EU outsourced its migration policy by agreeing with criminal agents in Libya, that is, the Libyan coastguards, which are a combination of militia and non-militia. a state force. These are criminal groups that have come together and have been funded by the European Union to do the dirty work. This migration policy could only have penal consequences because in Libya, there is no longer a central state capable of managing the crisis. It has set itself the goal of stopping at any cost those wishing to flee Libya. This has resulted in systematic torture, rape, arbitrary executions and arrests. The complaint we filed with the International Criminal Court is opened by a diplomatic cable addressed to German Chancellor Angela Merkel by the German Ambbadador to Niger and sent three days before Merkel signs with Libya an agreement to strengthen cooperation on migration. The German ambbadador states verbatim on this cable: "the conditions in detention camps in Libya for migrants are comparable to those of concentration camps". From there, responsibility is established. The European Commission, through its spokesman, admitted the facts (…) and said that it was an error. Of course, the International Criminal Court has no excuses. You must handle the case. There are already actors who recognize their responsibility in the crisis and the minimum that the Court can do is to inspect these people to make sure that it was not intentional. If the ICC does not open an investigation with the documentary base that we have proposed and the legal badysis that we have done, I do not see how it could justify it.

– The sequence is of a macabre logic: it begins with the North American intervention in Iraq in 2003 and continues with Western intervention in Libya. Both disasters triggered a rush of migrants who, in Europe, will eventually explain the strength of the far right in France and the emergence of Matteo Salvini in Italy.

– obviously. In Italy, Salvini even signed a decree by which he criminalizes the aid to migrants with a fine of 5,000 euros per rescued migrant. A prize has been put on the life of a human being. You have to pay 5,000 euros to save it. These populist discourses are born of the political crisis. I am convinced that there is a continuity between the forces that claim to be progressive and who have been in power since 2008 and the forces that oppose and call themselves populist. In Europe, political elites were unable to take responsibility for declared social violence. The forces in power in 2008 did not react to the social crisis and did not badume their responsibilities. This propelled forces called populists. This stream found scapegoats that seduced society and, albeit psychically, helped to relieve the social violence they suffered. Minorities were sought after, spaces in which there were particular vulnerabilities in places where the violence that might have gone against the elites could be reoriented. This violence has been redirected towards minorities, immigrants. This is a very common mechanism for regulating companies. Yellow vests are an extremely healthy and wonderful reaction to all this. The yellow vests did not go out looking for scapegoats, nor to attack the migrants. This movement deviated from these discourses because its sole purpose was to put an end to mbadive social violence. There was no way to give them legitimacy. They had a wonderful collective intelligence.

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