France shouldn’t remain silent on Julian Assange, leftist leader Jean-Luc Melenchon has said, after the imprisoned WikiLeaks co-founder’s father suggested that Paris could offer asylum to his son.
The life of Assange – who is being held in solitary confinement at London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison while a British court considers an extradition request by the US – is under threat, Melenchon wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.
“For years, we’ve been calling for France to accept him,” the head of the leftist La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party said, insisting that “France shouldn’t remain silent.”
The statement by Melenchon, who won 19.6% of the ballot in the first round of the French presidential election in 2017, follows a visit by Assange’s father, John Shipton, to the Whistleblower Meeting in Paris on Monday.
During the event, Shipton told Sputnik news agency that it would be “an honorable thing” for the French government to grant his son asylum.
“I feel that France hasn’t attacked Julian over the last 12 years and consequently France is free to act in return for the information that WikiLeaks and Julian brought to France,” he said, referring to the website’s revelations of the US intelligence agencies spying on French presidents and hacking into local banks.
🔴 John #Shipton : «La France n’a pas attaqué #Julian pendant les dernières années difficiles, donc la France est libre d’agir en échange des informations que #WikiLeaks et Julian ont apportées à la France. Ce serait honorable pour la #France d’offrir [l’asile] à Julian #Assange» pic.twitter.com/ceZ7qTARua
Several dozen French lawmakers have also recently called upon Paris to take Assange in, with the Australian-born publisher’s legal team saying last year that their client was hoping to find asylum on French soil.
Assange could face up to 175 years behind bars if he’s extradited to the US, where he’s wanted on espionage charges over the release by WikiLeaks of classified documents on Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and others.
He was placed in Belmarsh in April 2019 over breach of bail, after being holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for seven years.
The publisher had been fleeing an arrest warrant issued over sexual assault allegations which he has always denied, and which failed to result in any actual charges due to lack of evidence.
Assange’s supporters insist that he has actually been persecuted over his legitimate journalistic activities and revealing the truth to the public.
The UK High Court is expected to rule on the appeal by the US against a lower court decision to bar the WikiLeaks co-founder’s extradition to America due to the 50-year-old’s poor health condition and risk of suicide.
Assange’s team will then be able to challenge the ruling in the Supreme Court if it’s not favorable.
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Israeli and UAE defense suppliers have agreed to jointly develop unmanned vessels that can be tailored for a range of military roles, including anti-sub warfare. The move comes after the two countries held naval drills last week.
Emirati state-owned weapons maker EDGE group and the government-run Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) announced the partnership in Dubai on Thursday. In a joint statement, the firms said they would design the 170 m-USV (modular-unmanned surface vessels) series for both military and commercial applications.
The vessels, which can apparently operate remotely or with partial and complete autonomy, are expected to be used for “maritime security operations,” intelligence-gathering, surveillance, detecting and countering submarines and mines, and as a deployment platform for vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft such as helicopters and certain types of drones.
For commercial use, the manufacturers noted that they can be customized to serve in a variety of roles, including oceanography, pollution monitoring, oil and gas exploration, transportation, search and rescue, firefighting, and first interventions.
While not specifying the sources and amount of the project’s funding, or when production would begin, EDGE Chief Executive Faisal Al Bannai described the deal as an “important milestone” that would “open many doors” for the company in “local and global markets, military and commercial alike.”
According to the statement, the EDGE-owned Abu Dhabi Ship Building (ADSB) will design the vessel and integrate the platform’s control systems and payload. IAI will develop the autonomous control systems and provide various mission-requirement payloads to the control system units.
In March, the two companies had partnered up to develop an autonomous drone defense system to “detect, identify and intercept a broad range of threats.”
Last week, the UAE and Bahrain conducted their first-ever joint maritime drill with Israel’s navy. The US Fifth Fleet also participated in the five-day show of force in the Red Sea, which was reported by Israeli media outlets as sending a message to Iran.
The naval exercises came a little more than a year after Israel and the UAE established diplomatic ties in normalization agreements brokered by the Trump administration. The Abraham Accords broke decades of Arab consensus to not formally recognize Israel until the issue of a Palestinian state was settled.
