The Socialist Movement of Ghana (SMG) has condemned the effort to criminalise Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks and the practice of “investigative” journalism.
According to them, the effort had involved the abuse of judicial processes to extradite Julian Asange to the United States of America for allegedly leaking state secrets and endangering the lives of operatives deployed in the illegal war in Iraq and the adventures of the USA and its allies in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
This was contained in a statement issued by the Director of International Relations Department, Justice Henaku and copied to the Ghanaian Times in Accra yesterday.
It said “we are deeply conscious of the fact that the secrets which Assange and WikiLeaks allegedly released are evidence of the abuse of state power in the commission of crimes against humanity.”
The statement said the crimes had included extra-judicial killings, kidnapping, torture and other horrendous forms of abuse of the fundamental human rights of people including journalists and non-combatants.
“It is indeed shocking that the perpetrators of these crimes are walking free and are even in some cases treated as distinguished statesmen and women whiles Assange is being hounded as a common criminal,” it added.
It said “this twist of values must be troubling for all those who are committed to the building of a new world based on the principles of probity, accountability and transparency.”
The statement said those engaged in the criminalisation of free expression were the very forces which had held themselves as the moral compasses of all societies and had been pontificating on strict adherence to the value and principles of democracy including the construction of open societies.
“These are countries which have gone to war resulting in the deaths of millions of people under the cloak of resorting the democratic rights of citizens,” it stated.
The SMG, therefore, called on the Ghana Journalists Association, the West African Media Foundation, organisations of lawyers, civil society organisations and individuals to declare their unflinching solidarity with Julian Assange.
“We must come together to mobilise world opinion in support of the struggle to free Assange from the stranglehold of abuse of the right to free expression,” it added.