"Since I wrote this article (link below), I’ve interviewed Julian Assange’s father, John Shipton, who has just returned from a four-week, 17-city tour of the US, rallying support for his son. I asked John Shipton what he thought of the High Court decision to allow the US appeal.
To recap: at the end of Assange’s extradition hearing, Judge Baraitser denied extradition because of fears Assange might commit suicide if subjected to the harsh conditions inside a US Supermax prison where he would be housed if convicted.
The US appeal argued that the judge ought to have brought this matter up during the trial and sought assurances from the US about this. They pledged that Julian would not be held in total isolation or imprisoned at Florence, the supermax prison in Colorado, which will be Assange’s destination if found guilty, and they offered that any prison sentence given to Assange could be served in Australia.
The catch with these promises, said John Shipton, is that they are both tricks.
“The assurances the prosecution gives about incarceration in the US are falsities. If the CIA thinks or suspects that Julian will reveal the name of a US agent to a prisoner or anybody else, they can have Julian detained arbitrarily under SAMS (Special Administrative Measures), which are solitary confinement where there is no end.
“The other offer about serving a sentence in Australia again is nonsense. There is an agreement between the US and the UK that anybody given a jail term in either of those two countries can serve it in Australia. It is already there as a right. This disguises the fact that there are three levels of appeal in the UK: the High Court, the Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights, which could take up to three years to exhaust. In the US, before a person can serve their jail sentence in Australia, all avenues of appeal must be exhausted. The average time it takes to get to the Supreme Court in the United States is between ten and fifteen years, so there is fifteen to twenty years of court cases in jail before the possibility of serving a sentence in Australia. It is all just tricks. The horrible, vile persecution of Julian Assange, an Australian citizen.” Source (Dr John Jiggens via email to the petition July 16, 2021)