‘Champions of Media Freedom’: Celebrity lawyer Amal Clooney and Jeremy Hunt.

Nina Cross
21st Century Wire

As Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, fights on from inside high-security Belmarsh prison, we see a stream of ‘Media Freedom’ campaign tweets from the Foreign Office.  Jeremy Hunt’s campaign is apparently running parallel to Assange’s arrest and battle against extradition to the US by way of Sweden. But Hunt’s campaign cannot erase or hide the fact the British government is persecuting a journalist who has dared to empower people throughout the world with knowledge of their leaders’ war crimes. Nor can its shiny press releases blind us to its increasingly hostile and repressive position towards  journalists and truth-tellers.

On the day Wikileaks tweeted the first warning that Assange could have his asylum imminently withdrawn, British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced that the government’s new Media Freedom campaign which would be fronted by celebrity human rights lawyer Amal Clooney.  It was a media circus.  It was noticeable that despite Clooney’s previous role in Assange’s legal counsel, any connections between the two were effectively left out of mainstream media reports, so that without prior knowledge or research nobody would have known this was the case.

As Hunt’s media campaign got going, so did Clooney’s “Trial Watch,” part of her Clooney Foundation for Justice project, with a particular focus on journalists.  In its promotional video a narrator points out some telltale signs of an unfair court:

“Was the court’s presiding official impartial?

Are the public allowed to enter the courtroom?”

After Assange was betrayed by Ecuadorian president Lenin Moreno and arrested by UK police on 11th April, he was found guilty at Westminster Magistrate’s Court of skipping a police bail in 2012 when he sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, fearing extradition to the US via Sweden.   This is how ex-ambassador Craig Murray described the judge’s treatment of Assange that day:

“District Judge Michael Snow is a disgrace to the bench who deserves to be infamous well beyond his death. He displayed the most plain and open prejudice against Assange in the 15 minutes it took for him to hear the case and declare Assange guilty last week, in a fashion which makes the dictators’ courts I had witnessed, in Ibrahim Babangida’s Nigeria or Isam Karimov’s Uzbekistan, look fair and reasonable, in comparison to the gross charade of justice conducted by Michael Snow.”

At Southwark Crown Court on 1st May, the judge imposed a 12 month prison sentence on Assange for skipping the police bail in 2012 despite the fact no charges had ever been brought against him and successive Swedish investigations into sexual allegations had been dropped, with the most recent case dropped in 2017.  If we went looking for a ‘fair and reasonable’ application of the law it seems we would not find it in this court.  Anyone would have expected this sort of sentence in Victorian England or possibly in one of Donald Trump’s ‘shithole countries‘.

At Assange’s third court appearance, on 2nd May, which was conducted by video link, very few friendly faces were able to make it into court, as his case was moved to a small courtroom where only a few people were accommodated, despite many supporters turning up to attend. Only a few accredited press were allowed into small court, some of whom could have spent years smearing Assange.

So bearing in mind all of these questions hanging over the fairness of the British court system for Julian Assange, according to the standards of Clooney, the face of Hunt’s media freedom campaign, it seemed reasonable for this author to submit a ‘trial alert’ request to the Clooney Foundation to ask for Assange’s case to be monitored.  To-date they have yet to respond, but perhaps they are weighing up the odds it would meet with approval given husband George Clooney’s political alliances with Hillary Clinton who once suggested droning Assange.

Unfair treatment of Assange is not only visible through conditions set out in Clooney’s Trial Watch video; according to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention the sentence for skipping bail is disproportionate, and contravenes the “principles of necessity and proportionality envisaged by the human rights standards.”  Damning all round, by UN human rights standards and by the standards of Hunt’s very own media freedom envoy.

The day a British court dismissed entirely the human rights of a journalist fighting persecution,  Hunt’s Media Freedom campaign told us the British government cares about media freedom. Yes, we are to believe we have a civilised and fair government:

"The press must be unafraid to investigate and hold governments to account", says Foreign Secretary on day that UK jailed the head of world's most significant publishing organisation doing precisely that. https://t.co/cicE9Xhvsg

— Mark Curtis (@markcurtis30) May 1, 2019

Starting Hunt’s campaign a few weeks before World Press Freedom Day allowed for a constant flow of Foreign Office propaganda about media freedom:

If we believe in media freedom as one of the fundamental bastions of a free society then we need to stand up and talk about the dangers that journalists now face. #DefendMediaFreedom #WorldPressFreedomDay #WFPD2019 pic.twitter.com/w7IFX8z4zf

— Jeremy Hunt (@Jeremy_Hunt) May 3, 2019

Hunt’s campaign is a trust-building exercise.  The government cannot be attacking civil and human rights or the power of journalists as the Fourth Estate, or abusing its legal systems and courts if it is seen promoting media freedom, giving scholarships to students in Africa, and showing it concern for ‘bastions of a free society.’

We were presented with courageous female role models who bring us the truth:

'Our job is to report the truth. It is not to be neutral, it is to be truthful' @camanpour explains the vital role that journalists play in society. #WorldPressFreedomDay | #DefendMediaFreedom| #WPFD2019 pic.twitter.com/oU8IDVvOAq

— Foreign Office