On the UN Human Rights Day, Saturday, 10 December, from 3pm to 6pm, the group
FREE ASSANGE Italia will hold a sit-in and Christmas gift-giving party* in front of the UK
Embassy in Rome to demand an end to the unjust and inhumane detention of Julian
Assange, with the assurance that he will not be extradited to the United States.
As part of the worldwide initiative #Stand4Truth, the demonstrators will also reproduce, with
live figures, Davide Dormino’s celebrated sculpture “Anything to Say?”. The performance will
also take place contemporaneously in many public squares around the world.
The location of the initiative, the British Embassy, was symbolically chosen by FREE
ASSANGE Italia because the highly civilised United Kingdom, the country which gave the
world the Magna Charta, has been depriving Julian Assange of his freedom and holding him
as a political prisoner since 19 June 2012.
Indeed, as of 11 April 2019, Assange has been imprisoned in the maximum security facility
of Belmarsh, near London, without any conviction and in extremely severe conditions (total
isolation inside a 2m x 3m cell), awaiting his extradition to the United States, where a court
stands ready to sentence him to prison for up to 175 years, just for doing his duty as an
investigative journalist and publisher.
On a day when human rights will be celebrated all over the world, it is important to call
attention to the Assange case, both because he is the emblem of the violation of those
values, and because his imprisonment and the threat of his extradition represent the denial
of one of our most fundamental human rights: the freedom of the press, which includes the
right of an investigative journalist to reveal even secret documents if it is in the public
interest to do so (United States Supreme Court, 1971, New York Times vs. United States).
*Julian Assange, journalist and co-founder of WikiLeaks, has enabled us to discover,
through his eye-opening revelations, the crimes perpetrated by the powerful around the
world. His revelations have therefore been ‘gifts’ to public opinion and to the democratic
process, for they enable us to act as informed citizens. This is why we will be portraying
them as real gifts in our Christmas pageant outside the British Embassy this Saturday.
FREE ASSANGE Italia
