The Progressive International pays respects to the Traditional Owners of the land and their Elders, past and present.
We acknowledge their ongoing resistance to the destructive forces of colonialism and their sustained connection to water and land.
Sovereignty was never ceded.
MARY KOSTAKIDAS
“Coming to you from Sydney University, home of the Foundation which conferred on Julian Assange the Sydney Peace Medal for his exceptional courage and conviction that truth matters and justice depends on it.” - @MaryKostakidis
“For revealing how power works, what governments get up to…and the tools used to deceive citizens, his punishment has been brutal,” says @MaryKostakidis
The result of being pursued by the world’s most powerful govt, acc. to former UN Rapporteur @NilsMelzer, amounts to torture.
MARK DAVIS:
“Emphatically, Julian Assange redacted the most dangerous material from the Afghan War Logs,” says Davis.
“I was with him the evening he did so; He redacted 10,000 names…”
Refers to Australia’s prestigious @Walkleys who awarded Assange for his outstanding contribution to journalism.
Quoting the judges:
“Assange took a brave, determined and independent stand for freedom of speech and transparency … and the public’s right to know.”
KERRY O’BRIEN
“The longer Assange remains caught in the web of US legal procedure without demonstrable and effective intervention by the Australian Government to bring him home, the more the Australian Government’s credibility will suffer. "
“Julian faces 175 yrs in prison for committing acts of journalism, for the same publications for which he has won awards the world over,” says @Suigenerisjen
“The @NYTimes and @WashingtonPost made clear, the indictment criminalises
public interest journalism.”
JENNIFER ROBINSON
“The Freedom of the Press Foundation has called (Julian’s prosecution) the most terrifying threat to free speech in the 21 st century,” says @Suigenerisjen
“The American Government is lying about Julian Assange. That’s the bottom line,” says @JohnKiriakou.
“… the Espionage Act is unconstitutionally broad and vague (and) the freedom of the press is resting on this case.”
JOHN KIRIAKOU
“If they can prosecute Assange they can prosecute anybody,” says @JohnKiriakou
When they say they’ll treat Julian fairly, it’s a lie. The Eastern District of Virginia Court is made up of CIA, Dept. of Homeland Security, Govt. agencies. Julian won’t stand a chance.
DEAN YATES:
“My staff? Killed on my watch,” says Yates.
Lawyers from @Reuters tried to get a copy of the tape from the Pentagon so we could better protect our staff in Iraq.
“They refused … Then Assange published video of the entire attack.”
“Collateral Murder is pure truth-telling,” says Yates.
“Yet the US didn’t prosecute the men who pulled the trigger or anyone else in the chain of command … The real criminals are the architects of the invasion – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld.”
“Julian is a moral innovator; he made moral gains which had an immense effect on human life,”
says @KellieTranter
“Posterity will pay Julian the highest honour for putting into the world the things that we most value: truth, transparency and justice.”
KELLIE TRANTER
“@AlboMP Goes to Washington should be the story of an Australian prime minister standing up for truth and fairness and the rights of a citizen, securing the release of a person who has put his life on the line for those same values for the benefit of (all).”
BOB CARR
“The American involved in the exposure of American war crimes walks free … The Aussie is still being pursued,” says @BobJCarr
“These are war crimes and we know about them … because Julian Assange published them.”
“Without question, it's time for the persecution, prosecution and incarceration of Assange to come to an end,” says @Josh4Freo
“The parliamentary friendship group has called upon the US government to end the extradition process and set Julian Assange free."
DR. MONIQUE RYAN MP
“We’ll continue to speak to our own Government and hold them to account,” says @Mon4Kooyong
“As members of the Australian Govt, we need to do what we can to protect the freedom and rights of all Australians, but particularly those who speak truth to power."
SENATOR DAVID SHOEBRIDGE
“It should never be a crime to tell the truth,” says @DavidShoebridge
“Assange is a case study in how this country treats whistleblowers,” says @DavidShoebridge
“What we’re seeing has moved beyond neglect into an institutionalised attack, with the aim of silencing not just Julian but anyone who dares follow his example.”
BRIDGET ARCHER MP
“The ongoing persecution of Assange offends my sense of natural justice, human dignity and fairness,” says @BridgetArcherMP
“There can never be a legal solution to this case. It’s inherently political.”
.@YanisVaroufakis calls on @AlboMP to “move heaven and earth to unsully the bad name of previous Australian govts that stood idly by while one of its citizens was taken to the cleaners by recalcitrant, violent American administrators. Mr. Albanese, free Julian. Bring him home.”
BERNARD COLLAERY
"As with Witness K in Australia, speaking truth is Julian’s alleged crime. Detaining Julian Assange with the stated purpose of shutting down @WikiLeaks is precisely the conduct, namely hostage taking, that the United States pressed the world to outlaw."
BERNARD COLLAERY to Australian Prime Minister @AlboMP, who is “in his prime.”
“Mr Albanese, don’t leave an awful blemish on your legacy.”
“Australia has the power to bring Julian home,” says @Stella_Assange.
“@AlboMP, more than anyone, holds Julian's fate in his hands. I ask Prime Minister Albanese to take Julian's fate in his hands and bring him home to our kids, to me. End his suffering."
Thank you to this evening’s speakers, partners, organisers and everyone who joined the fifth #BelmarshTribunal to #FreeAssange.
Please join us in solidarity over the coming weeks in the following actions 👇
On this day ten years ago, Sakine Cansız, Kurdish revolutionary and one of two female founding members of the PKK, was assassinated during the triple murder of Kurdish activists in Paris, France. To some, she was known as the “Kurdish Rosa Luxemburg”, to others just as “Sara”.
Cansız was one of the first women to join the Kurdish freedom movement. As one of only two women to participate in the PKK’s 1978 founding congress, she proposed — inspired by examples from other socialist movements — the formation of autonomous women’s units.
In May 1979 she was arrested — and would remain in various Turkish prisons for 12 years, facing regular torture for her refusal to betray her comrades. Soon after her release in 1991, she did legal work at the party academy in Lebanon and went to the guerrillas in the mountains.
On 1 January 1804, the Haitian people threw off the chains of enslavement and established the world’s first Black Republic.
155 years later, on the island of Cuba, Fidel Castro led the Cuban people to defeat the forces of imperialism and embark on the path of socialism.
Drawing parallels between these two great struggles for national liberation, Trinidadian Marxist historian C.L.R. James wrote that “what took place in French San Domingo in 1792-1804 reappeared in Cuba in 1958.”
Haiti, like Cuba, was forcefully woven into the fabric of capitalism. When Columbus came to Haiti in 1492, he sought gold. “From gold comes great wealth,” he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. “And with it whoever possesses it can do whatever in the world that he wishes.”
The US military invaded Grenada on this day in 1983. The invasion toppled the Caribbean Island’s socialist government which had come to power four years earlier.
Under the pretense of evacuating US medical students, ‘Operation Urgent Fury’ was an imperialist intervention designed to crush the Grenadian liberation movement and any threat it posed to US influence.
In 1979, the New JEWEL Movement (NJM), led by Maurice Bishop, overthrew the repressive regime of Eric Gairy. Taking inspiration from Marx’s writings, Black Power movements, and anti-colonial struggles, the NJM had formed years earlier and established an armed wing.
On this day in 1965, the Indonesian military, working closely with the US government, initiated a coup that deposed President Sukarno and installed the 30-year dictatorship of General Suharto.
In the dark years that followed, the dictatorship massacred over a million Indonesian communists, with the CIA and US embassy staffers drawing up “kill lists” for the Indonesian military. The operation would become a template for future US regime change operations.
In 1949, President Sukarno led Indonesia to independence from Dutch colonial rule. He championed the non-aligned movement and hosted the historic Bandung Conference, a meeting of Afro-Asian states, in 1955.
Today, the Cuban people voted to adopt the most progressive Family Code in the world.
Over 66% of voters approved an amendment to the constitution that legally redefines what it means to be a family, putting an emphasis on love, human dignity, equality and non-discrimination.
The new Family Code took shape through a participatory process that involved 6,481,200 people, or around 75% of the Cuban electorate. Over 20 new drafts of the law were produced following nearly 80,000 neighbourhood meetings and almost 500,000 public proposals.
This is a milestone in the advancement of democracy. Nowhere in the world has a family law been submitted for public consultation and subject to a referendum.
This Sunday, the people of Chile will decide: Approve a new constitution or default to the old written under dictator Augusto Pinochet by a group of economists known as the ‘Chicago Boys’. Who were they? Why did they matter? And how can we bury their bloody legacy?
The ‘Chicago Boys’, a group of Chilean economists who had studied at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, wrote the El Ladrillo (or The Brick), during the campaign of Jorge Alessandri, the right-wing presidential candidate in the 1970 elections.
This document, finished just weeks before the US-backed coup of 1973, defined the Chilean neoliberal model, inspiring Pinochet's Constitution of 1980, and charting a path of misery that would define Pinochet’s 17-year rule.