Belmarsh Prison
===============

Belmarsh Prison is the maximum-security prison in London where Julian Assange was held after being removed from the Ecuadorian embassy. John Kiriakou treats it as one more stage in a life spent almost entirely in some form of confinement, the embassy before it, the prison after.

The bail-jumping sentence

Assange was sentenced to fifty weeks for bail-jumping. Kiriakou's assessment of the charge is that it was manufactured, and his reasoning is that nothing remained underneath it: Assange jumped bail on the Swedish sexual-assault matter, and that matter was withdrawn, "so technically he didn't jump bail."

He treats the placement as a second injury on top of the charge. Assange was not merely imprisoned but held "in maximum-security Belmarsh prison in solitary confinement with the worst serial killers, the worst most depraved criminals in all of the United Kingdom."

Held past the expiry

The detail Kiriakou returns to is what happened when the sentence ran out. Speaking in October 2019, he noted that Assange's prison sentence had expired nine days earlier and that he was still inside: the United States had asked the United Kingdom to keep him in Belmarsh "until we're darn good and ready to send the FBI's jet to London to pick him up and render him back to the United States." His summary of the arrangement: "everything about this is illegal."

The prosecution itself he describes as unprecedented in every element, a foreign national charged with espionage, and "one who's clearly a journalist and publisher", so that "literally everything in this case, every part of this case, is precedent-setting."

The letters

Kiriakou spoke with Assange in person only once, about six weeks before he was pulled out of the embassy. Their contact after that was by letter, exchanged while Assange was in Belmarsh.

He describes the correspondence as a record of decline. The first exchange, around ten months before he spoke, showed "a man in command": a page and a half of specific requests, call this attorney, ask these questions, call this activist, introduce him to this journalist. His one-word answer for Assange's state when they had spoken face to face was "frightened."

The extradition problem

Kiriakou identified a specific reason a British court might refuse to send Assange to the United States, and a reason it would not settle anything. There are precedents, plural, for British courts refusing extradition to the US because of the American use of solitary confinement, "an internationally recognized form of torture."

But refusal would not free him into safety. With no charges pending against him in the UK, Assange would have to be released from Belmarsh and then expelled as an Australian national, the Australian government having taken pains to renew his passport about a year earlier, after which "the US would ask Australia to extradite him. So there's no easy fix to this."

The hearings

Kiriakou's account of the proceedings during Assange's first year in Belmarsh is that they were a formality. Assange was brought out to state his name and date of birth and little else; he was not allowed to look at his prepared defence, was not permitted to talk to his attorneys, and his lawyers were given evidence they had requested roughly ten minutes before hearings. His term for it: "total kangaroo court."

See also

- Julian Assange
- John Kiriakou
- Espionage Act
