The left-wing Nupes coalition tabled a text on Monday July 3 again asking the French government to grant political asylum to Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks founder is accused of cybercrime and has been imprisoned in London for four years.
“We have been asking for his political asylum for years, still nothing is happening”, denounced the deputy LFI Arnaud Le Gall, at the origin of this initiative. L’Insoumis chose Julian Assange’s 52nd birthday to present a motion for a resolution on the subject to the press. Co-signed at this stage by around sixty deputies from the four Nupes groups (LFI, PS, EELV, PCF), this symbolic text castigates “ruthless judicial harassment” against Julian Assange.
“More than ever, France must welcome Julian Assange”, writes the deputy, pointing out that WikiLeaks has “allowed to reveal” that several French presidents (Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande) have been listened to by the American intelligence agency NSA. However, the motion for a resolution is not on the agenda of the Meeting at this stage. In February 2022, a fairly similar cross-party text was rejected by 31 votes to 17.
Arrested by the British police in 2019 after seven years recluse at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Julian Assange has been detained for almost four years in the high security prison of Belmarsh, in east London. The Australian national is being prosecuted in the United States for having published from 2010 more than 700,000 confidential documents on American military and diplomatic activities, in particular in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As such, he faces decades in prison. In June, during a protest in London, his wife Stella Assange said her husband’s extradition to the United States might be imminent. His supporters present him as a martyr of press freedom.