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Exclusive: Gabriel Shipton, the 40-year-old brother of Julian Assange, speaks with The Point about what is now a global movement to save his brother’s life.
By Jacquelene Pearson
Gabriel Shipton recalls the day he decided to join the campaign to oppose his older brother’s ongoing incarceration and potential extradition to the United States.
“I only became involved in this campaign because I saw Julian in the prison, I left one day after seeing him in the prison and felt that day like I might not see him again,” Shipton said. “I understood – this is a fight for Julian’s life and, if we don’t all do it, we could lose him.”
The Point’s interview with Shipton was conducted over the phone and his voice was eerily similar to his brother’s – Wikileaks founder, journalist and publisher, Julian Assange. Shipton’s tone was direct and his message clear – only a mass movement across Australia and the world will result in Assange walking from prison a free man.
Timeline
Assange, who turns 52 in July, founded the not-for-profit digital news service Wikileaks in 2006. In 2010 Wikileaks in conjunction with five newspapers published US defence information that had been leaked by Chelsea Manning.
The same year Sweden issued a European arrest warrant for Assange for alleged sexual assault. Assange denied the allegations and argued that they were a front for plans to extradite him to the United States related to the leaked US defence secrets.
Julian Assange unsuccessfully fought Swedish extradition orders, so he breached bail and took refuge in the London embassy of Ecuador where he remained from 2012 until 2019. He was granted asylum by Ecuador in 2012.
By 2019 Swedish prosecutors had dropped their charges but by April 2019 Ecuador had also withdrawn its asylum. Mr Assange was removed from the embassy by police, arrested, charged with breaching the Bail Act and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison.
Since then, the United States has unsealed multiple indictments against Assange including for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion and violating the Espionage Act. Meanwhile Julian Assange remains incarcerated in London’s Belmarsh Prison.
In 2021 a UK district court judge ruled against a US extradition attempt on the grounds of the risk to Assange’s mental health. He was denied bail pending an appeal by the United States. Later that year the High Court ruled that he could be extradited. Home Secretary Priti Patel approved the extradition in June last year but the following month Assange announced an appeal.
State of play
According to the Assange Australian Campaign website, the US government has charged the Wikileaks founder with 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one charge of conspiracy to commit unauthorized access to a government computer under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which is classified as an act of terrorism.
All major international human rights organisations, journalists unions and media outlets are opposed to his prosecution and extradition.
If convicted Mr Assange would be sentenced to 175 years in prison, clearly a sentence to death for performing normal journalistic tasks in the public interest. How are war crimes and human rights abuses to be uncovered if journalists end up incarcerated for doing their job?
Even though his 50-week sentence concluded in September 2019, Julian Assange remains in Belmarsh Prison. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled the sentence punitive and disproportionate to the nature of the offence.
Assange is an Australian citizen with a current passport. If he is not extradited to the US there is a current deportation notice which would result in the Australian Government being asked to accept him as a deportee.
He’s my brother
Take a moment to imagine how you would feel if it was your sibling or family member in Julian Assange’s position – put yourself in Gabriel Shipton’s shoes for the next couple of minutes. How would you cope?
“It would be much harder if we weren’t getting the support and seeing the responses from people all over the world,” Gabriel Shipton said. “We would still be doing it but if we didn’t have that support and weren’t getting good feedback from the actions that we do it would be a lot harder.”
According to Shipton, the campaign to free Julian Assange now has a life and momentum of its own.
“It is a huge global campaign, global movement now. It has been growing and growing and growing; there are many, many people involved. I think millions of concerned people and thousands upon thousands of very active supporters: from politicians, to journalists, musicians, filmmakers, all sections of society have grabbed onto this cause because I think they see what is at stake what is at stake from Julian’s persecution.”
Democracy’s core
“Really what Julian’s fight strikes at the heart of is what we believe a democracy or a representative democracy should be.
“We need to be able to make informed decisions that are in our benefit. To be informed citizens and participate in our society in a meaningful and informed way, so we can improve and reform our institutions based on access to information.
“I think people are realising that if a whistle blower has information and they cannot find a publisher to publish it, how are we going to know what is going on inside our government or our institutions.
“Julian and Wikileaks gave us this incredible window. I think a lot of people understood what was going on but they never had proof. They never had the documents to back up what was going on inside these institutions. Wikileaks gave us that incredible insight.”
Wikileaks worked overtime to uncover truths that were certainly in the public interest: war crimes and human rights abuses committed by the US government – the Collateral murder video, Iraq War Logs, Afghan war diaries, Cablegate and the Guantanamo Bay Detainee Manuals. Assange is consequently a multi-award-winning Australian journalist.
End game
Gabriel Shipton wants nothing more than what most siblings would want for their brother, “for Julian to be reunited with his family, to be free from persecution, to choose to live where he would like to whether that is Australia or anywhere else. That he be free to travel, just get on with his life like any of us take for granted, to be able to make decisions about how we want to live our own lives and not be locked in a prison cell.
“We talk a lot about this campaign and the decision to free Julian is not going to come from the top down.
“The people who are leading and pushing Julian’s persecution are not going to wake up one morning and say ‘we have done the wrong thing’. What is going to happen is mass public pressure, like we have seen in Australia, that has led our government to a point now that it is taking steps towards freeing Julian.
“A very large grouping of politicians from every party are now part of a large parliamentary group that are looking at ways to do more for the campaign.
“We are looking at ways to keep that public momentum going, to keep people telling their MPs about their concerns and taking them into parliament to keep the government continuing on its path and looking for ways they can level up their participation in what would be a political solution.”
If enough public pressure is exerted on all three of the governments involved: the UK, US and Australia, the need for a political solution to be struck will get stronger, Shipton said.
“I am not a diplomat but from what I understand about how these deals are made is that these people need to get together and figure out what needs to happen to end it and take concrete steps to achieve that. “You’ve got those three governments. Australia is the only government who can represent Julian at a diplomatic level, and then there’s the UK and US and these three governments are continually negotiating with each other, whether it be trade deals or weapons deals.
“We would ask them to treat Julian’s matter similarly. The Australian people want him free so how can our government work with the two other governments to make that happen – whether it is dropping the charges or the UK rejecting the extradition or Julian being extradited to Australia.
“We know that Julian’s lawyers have been speaking with the Australian appointed diplomats in Kevin Rudd and Stephen Smith and these are people who are involved in diplomatic activity. They are politically appointed diplomats in the UK and Washington, they see the President, they see the Prime Minister and they are the people who need to be negotiating.”
John Shipton, father of Julian and Gabriel, speaks with Julian every day. He just completed a two-month tour of the US which included 60 events as part of the campaign.
“Yes there is support in the US and it is growing. There is support across the aisle, from Democrats and republican congress people. On 11 April there was a letter that went from seven progressive congress people to call for [Attorney General Merrick] Garland to stop the extradition process. That was a first and I think that group will grow. It is not a left or right issue, it is about basic democratic and human rights. It is not partisan which is really good because that way we don’t suffer attacks from either side of politics.
“There is an American person running for the Democratic nom, Robert Kennedy Junior, and he has said that on his first day as president that he will pardon Julian Assange. A recent Rasmussen poll said Jo Biden is only ahead of Kennedy by 1 per cent as preferred Democratic nominee. That shows that having a policy of freeing Julian Assange in the United States is not a losing policy.
“Peter Dutton came out and said he supports Labor on this. Having that political consensus makes life easier,” Shipton said.
What you can do
‘Free Julian Assange’ is now a common graffiti slogan. It was recently emblazoned on a brick wall in Gosford, suggesting the Assange campaign has already entered the local consciousness. If you care about public interest journalism and the democratic freedom to hold power to account, then freeing Julian Assange is a local issue. So what can you do to support the campaign.
“We do have the petition to President Biden via Caroline Kennedy, so that is one small thing people can do.
“We will present that petition to Caroline Kennedy.
“We will let the petition run for a little longer, it is still growing and we are getting hundreds of signatures every day. Ideally my dad would make an appointment with Caroline Kennedy and present the petition to her but if we can’t get the appointment we will stand on the street and deliver it.
“We have a meet your MP program where Australians can go and meet their parliamentarian and discuss their concerns about Julian. People taking their concerns to their representatives has really led to where we are now.
“We are surrounded by incredible supporters who support us emotionally and financially, every single dollar that goes into this campaign is donated.
“It is just to keep the pressure on.
“A year ago the journalists in this country weren’t paying the kind of attention they are now. We are lucky in that sense; they keep asking the government what they are up to.
“We need to keep holding the government accountable. Senate estimates, question time, these are all ways we can find out what the government is doing and keep the momentum there, keep helping them along if you will. If they’re left to their own devices and we all go to sleep, they will not stay focused on this issue.”
Gabriel Shipton said he and Julian’s father, John, is old but strong.
“My dad speaks to Julian every day, he said he is quite low at the moment.
“I think what keeps him going, and I have heard this from other political prisoners, is knowing there are people on the outside fighting for them.
“It raises his spirits when he speaks to John or [wife] Stella, and they can let him know when there were a thousand people marching through the streets of Sydney like there were the other day. That really keeps him going.”
