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UPDATE – 8:00 PM EST: Assange’s address concluded. I’ll have a post on his address soon.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will address the United Nations on the status of his asylum case within the hour via satellite from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino and Baher Azmy, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents Assange and WikiLeaks in the United States, are giving a presentation as well.
I appeared on RT America to discuss what Assange might hope to gain from addressing UN members. I said he hopes to recruit more support from the international community to pressure the United Kingdom, Sweden and the United States to allow him to have safe passage to Ecuador. (NOTE: He isn’t addressing the General Assembly as the host suggested in the segment. He is addressing UN members in a room at the UN, who are in New York for the UN General Assembly meeting.)
Assange has been in the Ecuador embassy in London for one hundred days now. There are no signs that he will be able to leave the embassy without arrest anytime soon.
Feed for Assange’s address to the UN can be watched here. He is scheduled to speak some time between 7:00 pm EST and 8:30 PM EST. Patino began speaking just after 6:30 PM EST.
4 Comments
Thank you, Kevin.
I am most interested in what Assange will say and the reception his words might have.
DW
I seem to have missed Assange’s speech, Kevin.
If it might, somehow, be made available on this post, I suspect that many at FDL,, when they realize that it is available, will want to see it.
Again, I thank you for the many incredibly important things you bring to our attention and understanding.
DW
RT just released a new Assange clip… Assange to UN: US is trying to build a ‘regime of secrecy’
Go, Assange, and, Free Bradley Manning…!
RT’s follow on article… Assange to UN: ‘It is time for the US to cease its persecution of WikiLeaks’
This Zinger lept out at me…
…Assange was highly critical of US involvement in the Arab Spring, denouncing Obama as audacious for exploiting it. He added that it is “disrespectful of the dead” to claim that the US has supported forces of change.
“Was it not audacious for the US President to say that his country supported the forces of change in the Arab Spring? Tunisian history did not begin in December 2010, and Mohamed Bouazizi did not set himself on fire so that Barack Obama could be re-elected,” Assange told the panel.
“The world knew after reading WikiLeaks that Ben Ali and his government had for long years enjoyed the indifference, if not the support, of the US, in full knowledge of its excesses and its crimes. So it must come as a surprise to the Tunisians that the US supported the forces of change in their country, and it must come as a surprise to the Egyptian teenagers who washed American tear gas out of their eyes, that the US administration supported change in Egypt”