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Alex Lo
SCMP Columnist
My Take
by Alex Lo
My Take
by Alex Lo

Julian Assange should have come to Hong Kong

  • WikiLeaks founder would have been safer in this city than being holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London
  • International politics under the sway of Washington doesn’t get any dirtier

Julian Assange was smart, but not as smart as US whistle-blower Edward Snowden when it came to escaping from the clutches of the American global police state.

Say what you like about the decline of press freedom in Hong Kong, at least we let one of the two greatest sources of 21st-century journalism escape into exile after he exposed the global, pervasive and mostly illegal surveillance – domestically and around the world – by the United States National Security Agency. You can’t say the same about Australia, Britain and Ecuador under Lenin Moreno for conspiring to do the bidding of imperial Washington to entrap Assange.

The founder of WikiLeaks who exposed American wartime atrocities and criminality in Iraq and Afghanistan, should have come to Hong Kong and would probably still have his freedom.

Instead, he was trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for seven years and is now lingering in British detention for possible extradition to the US.

Why has Britain been so eager to get its hands on Assange? It was supposedly to extradite him to answer allegations of rape and sexual assaults in Sweden. Now we know – the Americans have long had a secret arrest warrant for him.

As an Australian, you would think Canberra would try to protect Assange’s legitimate human and legal rights. But the Australian government, the Labor Party and the Liberal Party have all washed their hands of Assange. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said no special treatment would be given. How about just standard legal diplomatic protocol and protection?

No surprise there. The Australian government has been trying to jail a whistle-blower for up to 161 years for exposing shenanigans at the Australian Taxation Office; and passed a law to weaken encryption and compel tech companies to hand over “secured” messages to police and security agencies.

Meanwhile, Moreno has made nice with Washington and turned away from the “leftist” policies of his predecessor Rafael Correa, who increased government spending, reduced poverty and raised the minimum wage – policies that were anathema to Washington and the International Monetary Fund.

Just as rapprochement is achieved between the US and Ecuador, and the IMF has approved US$4.2 billion in loans to the South American country, Assange was released into the custody of British police and an Ecuadorean judge has ordered the arrest of former foreign minister Ricardo Patino, who authorised Assange’s asylum.

With Assange, international politics under the sway of Washington doesn’t get any dirtier.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Julian Assange should have come to HK
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