As my colleagues Ravi Somaiya and Marc Santora report, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange addressed supporters in London on Sunday from a first floor balcony at the Ecuadorean Embassy, where he has been holed up for two months, seeking to avoid extradition to Sweden.
BBC News made video of the complete speech available online and a supporter of Mr. Assange posted a screenshot from Russian television on Twitter showing the rows of British police officers outside the embassy. Britain has promised to arrest Mr. Assange and send him to face questioning in Sweden on allegations of sexual misconduct if he leaves the embassy, even though Ecuador granted him political asylum on Thursday.
Photo of the unbelievable amount of police in front of the Ecuadorian Embassy during Julian #Assange's speech. http://t.co/tHMJlk9o
- M Cetera (@m_cetera) 19 Aug 12
The London bureau of Russia Today, the state-financed satellite news channel that broadcasts Mr. Assange's talk show, posted photographs of the two pages of prepared remarks Mr. Assange held in his hand as he spoke. A more readable form of the full speech text was published on the Web site of the Australian radio station Triple M.
During the address, Mr. Assange varied little from his prepared text, in which he made no mention of the accusations against him in Sweden, but called on the United States to “renounce its witch hunt against WikiLeaks.†Mr. Assange and his supporters cl aim that the allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against him by two Swedish women are nothing but a ploy to discredit him and make it easier for him to be extradited to the U.S. to stand trial for facilitating the leak of hundreds of thousands of secret military and diplomatic documents and video recordings.
Near the end of his speech, Mr. Assange equated his plight to those of the American Army private, Bradley Manning, who is accused of providing the classified American documents to WikiLeaks, and to political prisoners in Bahrain and Russia.
Casting himself as a victim of a global war on freedom of speech, Mr. Assange invoked the two-year jail terms imposed Friday on members of the Russian protest band Pussy Riot, and noted that Nabeel Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, was sentenced to three years in prison on Thursday (although the WikiLeaks founder incorrectly said that Mr. Rajab's term was punishment “for a tweet.†Mr. Ra jab was sentenced to three one-year terms this week for “inciting†and attending demonstrations; he was previously sentenced to three months in prison for mocking the country's prime minister in a Twitter update.) He concluded by saying: “There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response.â€
BBC News also broadcast video of the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who is representing Mr. Assange, speaking to reporters outside the embassy on Sunday. Apparently reading a prepared statement, Mr. Garzón said that Mr. Assange “has always fought for truth and justice and has defended human rights and continues to do so. He demands that WikiLeaks and his own rights also be defended.â€
