President Andrés Manuel López Obrador urged the United States to pardon Julian Assange. The Mexican president assured that he will speak with Joe Biden on the subject on July 12 in Washington and warned that if the founder of Wikileaks is transferred to U.S. soil, he will start a campaign to have the statue of liberty dismantled.
The meeting between President Joe Biden and the Mexican president will take place despite López Obrador's refusal to participate in the ninth Summit of the Americas in June, because the representatives of the dictatorships of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua were not invited.
AMLO's declarations in defense of Assange come days after The Washington Post together with the organization Reporters Without Borders published in the printed edition of the newspaper a demand for the protection of journalists, stating that Mexico "is the most dangerous country in the world for the press". A total of 12 journalists have been murdered this year 2022 in the Aztec nation.
The Mexican president has gone so far as to refer to Julian Assange as "the best journalist of our time," and even went so far as to offer him asylum last year. He also asked "all human rights organizations" as well as the United Nations to make pronouncements on the issue.
Charges Assange faces
The Australian computer programmer and journalist faces 18 charges, including espionage, for WikiLeaks publications about alleged abuses at Guantanamo Bay and in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, classified information and diplomatic cables. The government of the United Kingdom, where he has been imprisoned since 2019,signed on June 17 the decree for the extradition of the founder of WikiLeaks to the United States.
According to Gabriel Shipton, Assange's brother, last week the journalist's legal team appealed to the High Court in London in order to block the extradition. It is likely that with this legal maneuver the case will take more months.
