The main theme of the action was to call on the US president to drop the legal proceedings against Assange, exactly four years since he was incarcerated in London

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the 1998 Belfast Agreement (aka the Good Friday Agreement) United States president Joe Biden paid an official visit to Ireland. 

A big fanfare and much adieu was made for him by the Irish and British governments and their respective State machinery operating on both sides of the Partition Line. 

This included the Irish Government allowing him to make a speech to the politicians at An tOireachtas (The Legislature) in Dublin,which some elected representatives boycotted. 

DiEM25 members from the Belfast and Dublin Collectives were at the Peace Bridge in Derry to hold one of their on-street community conversations while he was in the country. The main theme of the action was to call on the US president to drop the legal proceedings to persecute DiEM25 Advisory Panel member Julian Assange.

They also highlighted that it has been exactly four years since Julian was incarcerated in a high security prison in London after being illegally and forcibly removed from political asylum protection at the Ecuadorian Embassy. 

As part of publicising and outlining the reasons for their event the participating DiEM25 members produced the following text: 

“After the ‘Collateral Murder’ video exposing war crimes was released for public consumption by WikiLeaks, Biden infamously declared that ‘Assange is a high-tech terrorist’. But knowing this to be a false deflection the administration of president Barack Obama, with Biden as vice president, did not dare to prosecute Julian, because they believed and admitted that to do so would mean prosecuting established media outlets, such as the New York Times, who regularly publish ‘classified’ material from ‘whistleblower’ sources. This changed with the Trump Presidency when that administration started processes through the British Courts to get Assange extradited from the UK. This resulted in Julian’s confinement in a British high security prison in London where he still languishes. 

“US presidents have always claimed to be in favour of ending the conflict in Ireland. Bill Clinton as president got centrally involved in the political processes in Ireland and the UK leading to the signing of the Belfast Agreement, and the endorsement of it by the majority of the people throughout the island of Ireland. This enabled him to try don the mantle of ‘peace-broker’ worldwide. Yet in 1999, about a year afterwards, he contradicted this by arranging for the bombing of Yugoslavia by US / NATO warplanes. 

“Today with Biden at the helm of the US State, NATO is continuing to be similarly immersed in brokering war and interventions in various parts of the world. The unjust victimisation of journalists and publishers who are genuinely working for peace, such as Julian Assange, exposes the real war-fuelled intentions of the US-European military apparatus.

“As an easily achievable first step on any path to peace, the extradition proceedings against Julian should be dropped. It is in the power of president Biden to get this done, and he must act now.”

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