 And I'm now very much very happy to welcome Dustin Hoffman, he's a lawyer and he is the office manager for Martin Sonneborn, the party member of the European Parliament and Dustin Hoffman had a special insight because he was present on site in the court case against and he will now tell us about that in February and September 2020 for five weeks altogether the expedition case was held in court and we have the closing reports now and on the 4th of January the judge said the decision will be announced and we are very interested in what's going to happen there and happy to start to talk about the exhibition case of Dream Assange. Okay, I'm reporting from London digitally and you've already said that I was able to see both parts of the court case personally and I'll now take you into the amount of experience, the cash experience that I have collected so I'll tell you what I've been talking about so that you can decide whether you want to stick on, I'll talk to you about who I am and for those that are not so much familiar with the case I will give some background and I would like to explain to you why I actually observed the case, how I came to do that, where the procedures were held, when it was held, who was involved and the most important block will be about the arguments that were exchanged and how it will continue although it has been spoiled in a sense. As I said, I am the head of the parliamentary office, I followed this case on Twitter, there will be no time for a Q&A but sometime tomorrow there will be a talk with Christianeer, a reporter on the case, so if there are any questions there tomorrow will be a good opportunity for that. So very shortly at the background what happened, why did the United States apparently develop such a huge problem with Julian Assange and with WikiLeaks? Julian Assange since 2006 works for the platform WikiLeaks where whistleblowers can show up and publish material and in early 2010 Chelsea Manning who was serving as a soldier in Iraq for the US army leaked, took material from computers about the Afghanistan war and the Iraq war and and cable reports which made the case known as cable gates, this is information that embassies collect and send home so that the government at home is informed what they are doing and what happens and this was given to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning and published in stages, they started in July 2010 with the Afghan war diary that was about the Afghanistan war and then it continued in October with the Iraq war logs and from November 2010 the cable reports were published and what's important here is that from November 2010 it's not as if they just made all the material available in one go they were redacted so the timeline of the case is very important and I'll come back to it from September 2011 the cable reports were published without redaction and the fact that these two stages occurred are important for judging the case later on come back to that when I explain how things went on in front of the court now today Jürgen Assange is in the Belmarsh prison in London how did this happen how did he get there in August 2010 the Swedish state prosecutor issued an arrest warrant charging him with sexual or misconduct against two women and on the basis of that he was arrested in London in December 2010 but released on bail and the audio has stopped for me because Assange was afraid of being extradited to the US after the UK they agreed to extradite into Sweden Assange escaped into the embassy of Ecuador and Ecuador granted asylum and he was then stuck in the embassy kind of imprisoned and he lived there until in April 2019 the asylum was taken away there was a change of government in Ecuador in a different direction they wanted to strengthen ties with the US and it looks like probably the US exerted pressure on Ecuador and the British police was invited in April 2019 to enter the embassy and Assange was arrested because he had skipped the bail and one hour after the arrest the US went ahead and said they want Assange to be extradited and you might wonder how that happened within this interface of one hour and the reason was that since 2017 an extradition request had been there but that had kept him secret he was pronounced guilty in terms of found guilty in terms of having skipped bail on the day of the arrest and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison and now the audio has stopped again so he went to prison and he is now imprisoned in Belmarsh prison under very difficult circumstances he's in extradition imprisonment now the skipping bail issue has been dealt with and is over but because he is said to be liable to try to escape he really he um removed his electronic this is not going to go well so the US in May 2019 stepped up the charges and based on an SPNR law in 1917 and that was probably simply to exert more pressure on the defense because they were given very little time to prepare the defense how did i get to observe the proceedings um we were debating in the martin's on the bone office and uh i wanted to speak about during assault i don't know if that was in parliament i didn't get that because the audio is breaking up again i've just heard from the control room that my audio is breaking up so for bandwidth reasons i'm going to switch off my camera and i hope that that will improve things well doesn't seem to be the case is there any guidance from the control room um it's very sorry can the control room tell me which parts were lost i'll just continue so in April 2019 my superior martin's on the bone MEP said i should be speaking about junior i wasn't so sure i remember there was something sexual misconduct rape charges and he said well take a deeper look and there was the UN special rapporteur wishing a report that i looked at and i read that and thought what the hell is this what is happening and i then read more into it and when the procedure started in February there were NGOs active in Brussels um asking for political observers saying that well the case is now starting it would be good if people were there to keep an eye on what is happening and observe and report about it and when the pandemic started we decided that we should ask whether i the office manager could go in his place in martin's on the bone's place and for reasons of health protection i am younger so we decided that i would be the one to go and observe the case in february as well as in september i was there to serve in martin's on the bone's name and report back to him as already said they were these two blocks in february 2020 and in september there are administrative hearings once a month which normally takes just five to ten minutes it's not anecdote on that later and on the fifth fourth of january the decision is supposed to be announced and i said that there are many observers in february and not so many very restrictive actors in september so two uh german MEP MPs MPs from the left party were there a lot of press that was all accepted and in september suddenly things were very different it was quite easy for me i wrote an email and heard okay we'll tell the court and you can come but when we arrived there was quite an outcry because NGOs around the world were trying to observe and reporters without borders were trying it and were not given access given seats in the room and we try to find out why we tried to exert pressure on the first day they said unless you can go to the visitors gallery but overall it always was a problem on the first day of proceedings the video links there were streams that were generated that political observers and the press could use and NGOs as well and these access points for political observers and NGOs were all withdrawn on the first day so they were there and had no access at all to the proceedings and in that regard i talked to christianne mir from reporters without borders he is the executive of the german department and he is very experienced with observing court cases around the world and when journalists are indicted reporters without borders go and observe what's going on i had an interview with him and asked him how he compares this to other cases and this is a quote from the video i have to say at first that i felt more welcome in all these countries turkey and russia as an observer from an international human rights organization and reporters without borders that has observer's stages at the united nations at the european council and other international institutions more welcome than here at this extradition procedure against junior stange now that draws a very bitter picture the few proceeds that were available at the visitors gallery they could only get because activists in the morning queued very early on and then handed over the seats to the NGOs saying that reporters without borders should be there without these activists who got up early and queued even fewer people would have had an opportunity to let NGOs watch there were two locations where the court case was carried out in the wilwich crown court and the central criminal court old bailey in london why was that the first court is very far outside london because it is right next to the prison the julien assange is being held in and there's a tunnel from the court from the prison right into the court so he wouldn't be i wouldn't have to be transferred from one location to the other but still his cell was searched several times during the court hearing and his documents were scrutinized even though they had those added security measures already so that was bizarre it's a very depressing building as well and you don't hear anything better from the conditions at the prison supposedly the radiator isn't working and it's very cold in the building the canteen i can report from there for myself and if that is what the lawyers are eating i don't want to know what the prisoners are getting the other court is old bailey in london which is a famous court you can compare it to the highest court in germany but the biggest difference to the german edition is that it is way older and it goes back to times of where the death penalty was still frequently carried out and yeah you in olden times um executions were carried out in front of the court and if you've seen the for vindetta you may remember the building for the one that was blown up in the end and it's been reconstructed and renovated and on top of the dome you can see justice but the actual process was in a different part of the building that's less ancient who was part of the proceedings of course julian's assange himself who sat at the far end of the room behind a thick glass barrier across from him the judge venessa buritzer just for context the buildings and rooms of the court are not relevant to the proceedings because it's a magistrate court proceedings with a district judge normally this court would carry out small proceedings with less than a year prison terms but states trust in each other's rule of law and if a state is prosecuting a person in another state then because the states are friends court cases can be carried out in the other country and here we had a district court judge which says nothing about her competence but still it's a very large task then we have the legal teams on the prosecution and the defense side in defense edwards jib fits jails mark summers and large ivy son just to tell you how these proceedings go on yet we have different kinds of lawyers with baristas and they have talk tasks like no baristas are only in the court the the the law now the audience is gone unfortunately the queen's council that's a title that would fall in for besonders erfahrene leute also we have me two besonders hochrangige erfahrene i did some rich search on the baristas um edward fits jowl is and a very renowned lawyer and also the other lawyers are very good lawyers robert since it's mitem sal and stella morris here julian's fiancée and other colleagues and joseph ferrell members just joseph ferrell the league's ambassador and also julian assange's father the prosecution was carried out by lewis dobbing and smith and they were also um testimonies but they were done digitally and with great delay because of technical problems so as i said that is the main hall and then there's a different hall where the where there's a stream so people from the press could watch but because julian assange is behind the glass he doesn't have a micro he didn't have a microphone and because he wasn't supposed to be talking and press couldn't understand him at all and so it was agreed on that somebody could always be in the hall so they could write down what julian assange said and then tell the others so that people would be able to cite him and now let's talk about the proceedings part one of the proceedings in february that was four days where um just papers were being read besides presented their case now the audio is gone again it's strictly prohibited to take photos in court so i didn't take this photo but i found it on twitter and i wanted to show you because that it is what it looked like um the first part of the trial you can see assange behind the bars with behind the glass um with a security member and the acoustics was incredibly bad the press members were basically crammed into a tiny building container and if somebody spoke into the mic as soon as they would start speaking you couldn't understand anything anymore so it was basically impossible to understand what was being said and the acoustics and the room itself was also so bad that the lawyers um asked whether julian assange could talk to them directly because anytime he wanted something people would have to turn back and the even the prosecution said that would be okay because it's not um about a violent crime and the judge said yeah well no it's difficult because if he's not in the dock and the audio is gone so no they didn't do it they delayed it um they put phone it to the next day and um it came out that it's not true you don't have to get special permission to um for the um for the lawyers to talk to assange directly but still the judge prohibited and they said well we have time the proceedings will go on as long as they need and unsurprisingly the um second uh in the second court hearing they didn't suddenly didn't have time so when somebody wanted to talk to the law uh to the judge he wanted to say something to his team and then up on the visitor gallery people started waving for um attention that the lawyer wanted to talk and then other people just kept talking over that person patchy audio sorry so this just shows how impractical the whole um court hearing was but the judge was still of the opinion that that was fine and that's not understandable because all visitors i've spoken to um didn't understand at all why that was the case and why he couldn't sit with his lawyers um so coming to the part two of the proceedings in september and about the content and uh the cases so um prosecution had to kind of justify why they would extradite assange in dem stehen bestimmte gründe drin warum jemand nicht ausgeliefert so for example there are a different um justifications for why people can't be extradited because of unfair treatment in us courts patchy audio sorry um but we have also heard um technical experts that um testified about how passwords are generated and saved and what kinds of encryption is unbreakable but that was for context so that we got an understanding um of the technical possibilities and the technical background i must admit that i still don't understand everything and that was not because of the witnesses that was that's because of me it would have been more understandable for others i guess now um when i speak about witnesses it may be a bit confusing because um there are different types of witnesses in english and um they are also expert witnesses who just provide technical background and not just witnesses who have witnessed the actual event so most witnesses were called by defense and not by the prosecution and they had um their expert opinion in writing um and the defense could go through the expert opinion and ask questions to the expert and then the then there's the cross examination where the other side is being questioned that can go on for an hour maybe even for four hours so the prosecution definitely had a special way of dealing with the witnesses i haven't seen many british court cases so i may not know what's normal but um they those are experts they're really experts on their field and they try and prosecution tried to discredit their expertise and tried to well it was really absurd because they tried to undermine those experts even though they were scientists professors and the lawyers um they pretend it's all like an exam at school asking them very basic questions for hours we had a neuropsychiatry professor who said that who even was asked things like what is the definition of depression and he said things like excuse me um i'm actually i um helped define depression i i certainly won't have to do that here so yeah so this is how this picture emerges about the whole character of the case now about the possible political motivation of the procedure the court case one of the main items that we talked about a lot was trump's war on journalism war on journalism that is a thing that you probably have heard already we heard about people analyzing how often trump on twitter was attacking journalists there was a professor on journalism mark philstein who quite early on i took out a story philstein when donald trump was elected a few audio raking up again and so it was the whole thing with all these leaks and it was such just not on and the response was that we should be putting a head on a spike as a message we should trump is supposed maybe said apparently said that maybe we should put some journalists in prison and then he instructed his director daniel to take action against leaks anything that was embarrassing to the white house and that was a moment when it really started it was interesting from a scientific point of view to listen to to observe this as we've all seen that donald trump as a president had a different way of dealing with the press than his predecessors but it was interesting to actually have empirical proof on that of course the opposing side doesn't agree at all and says trump does not have any specific issues with the press but just to make clear where all this anger might come from the whole whistleblower thing the whole aggression against weak leaks we've heard many witnesses say how important the work done by weak leaks is for investors to investigate for journalism and for uncovering states misbehavior we had a professor saying that the way war is conducted has changed because states are not simply entering into military exchanges because it's no longer possible to deceive the public about the way things are going we had representatives of the iraq body count project saying that through the iraq war leaks the number of civil casualties was corrected up by 15 000 15 000 civil deaths that no one knew about before could now be added to the death toll and from the materials that were published and that of course is unpleasant to the warring parties and to the to the warring collection and that's why they're not fans of wiki leaks and we were going to hear kalita mazri kalita mazri a german citizen as a witness um audio breaking up kalita mazri is a victim of u.s. torture and it would have been one of the rare moments when an actually proven torture victim could have confronted the west your lies but that did not happen um the only way to actually say something was to shout things from the gallery we heard breaking up again so we'll see how painful the publication of materials from niki weeks can be halet mazri is a german national with lebanese background lived in germany for 25 years and late 2003 um he um without any reason he was held for three weeks he was not allowed to contact the german embassy because it was not believed that his passport was genuine he wasn't allowed to contact a lawyer and at that point already he was being tortured as the human united nation's cause of human rights has found he was driven to the airport and men in masks were waiting for him cut off his clothing he was given had to wear he was kidnapped on a religion flight and turned up in a torture prison in afghanistan and it turned out they had got the wrong person and he went on a hunger strike while they were still were they were already aware that he was the wrong guy but they kept on holding him torturing him although they knew he was the wrong person and they for 34 days they force fed him through the nose and that is incredibly painful and he talked with a native german speaker called sam it's not clear what role that person had when halled amasri was then released and told that he would never be allowed to talk about what had happened to him they would keep in keep watching him and something would happen he would he was then put on another flight his head was covered so all he knew was that he was in a country where people were speaking a slavic language he was released and put on a street and told not to turn around but just walked down the street and he assumed that that would be his death they would be shooting him from behind that did not happen he went around a corner there were three policemen and found out that he was in albania and then flown to germany he went home his wife went to lebanon had gone to lebanon um wife and and the wife having noticed that the husband had disappeared had gone back to lebanon and history and begun so he took on a lawyer and uh no one believed him at first and in germany and the us with the help of investigative journalists um he tried to achieve justice there was a court case against 13 c a employees nothing at all happened in the us so they thought okay this is just collateral damage of what we have to do and the incredible thing is and this is where wikileaks is very important through the diplomatic cables that were published it turned out that the german government at least when he had been returned to germany they knew about what happened and they knew that had been a mistaken identity but nobody helped him he was still fighting for people to believe him and the german government already knew it later turned out that the u.s government it was clear from from the materials that u.s government had exerted pressure on the german government to not seek extradition of these cia agents and that of course for a government is a very painful thing to do if that would become known that even their own citizens were being left unprotected um we received a written statement in yates who in 2007 was the head of the reuters dependency in bagdad reuters is a press agency and he was there when the incident that you may know as collateral murder which is one of the videos an incident when in a us apache fighter helicopter shots a billion people and two reuters journalists as well and he said that after this incident he had contact with a military that showed him extracts from the video and said well we thought through the camera the camera we thought was a weapon um and an anti-tank weapon and there was nothing we could do he always tried to receive the full video never did and then it was published as collateral murder by buckeleaks and then he saw that the whole claims were wrong the video is very hard to watch these pilots are congratulating themselves each other they are mocking the dead people the victims it's quite clear from the video that the way it was claimed is not the way it happened and and the mistaken mistaken of a camera for a weapon is very unlikely so he is still suffering from the fact from the fact how he was deceived he's from post traumatic stress is always saying that his family life was ruined because he thought something could have been done maybe they acted wrong it's my own fault and then he found through a week that wasn't a case at all he was just severe war crime i forgot to say about almas the the international criminal court has taken on the issue now the almas recase the torture in afghanistan in a u.s. run prison and the u.s. has taken action against the chief prosecutor at the international criminal court that's the kind of response you can expect we heard other investigative journalists that said that material from buckeleaks was about the most valuable that they had but making it possible to understand things they could never have understood otherwise and just as a small overview this shows how important this is for the public and how dangerous for governments if their misconduct should become known the afghanistan war as well as the iraq war was portrayed as something that went very well and then where everything was behaving well and and it's become known that that was not the case and that the public was quite heavily deceived and within the in the course of this political process the timeline is very important to it's very important from the indictment to know that the obama administration was already investigating but no charges were brought and we've heard from several sources that this was because the obama administration was reticent to establish precedence that would put the whole press freedom into question now when the trump administration was in place suddenly the charges were brought and to understand the way this was published on other platforms as well we have to understand how this all happened how these diplomatic reports were published unredacted by wikeleaks later on when they received the material wikeleaks had wikeleaks contact at several leading western media and established a working group that took a look at the materials they've given the materials and went through them and this would only be published in redacted form names dug out so that no sources would be revealed and put in danger and no one else either and what happened was that wikeleaks during Assange handed out an encrypted document and the encryption as we heard from a witness was not breakable without knowing the password within the framework of what is now technically possible what happened now is that a guardian journalist david lei wrote a book about the whole affair and because at the time wikeleaks was targeted by hackers repeatedly who tried to take down the website there were several mirrors of that page and these included this file now this journalist wrote the book in which he described the scene when Assange gave him the password for that file and Assange gave him one part of the password on a paper and another part had to be added through something that Assange explained to him orally and the whole password then was published by this journalist in his book and it took a while until an article at the freitag magazine appeared and said a data leak has occurred if you put one in one if you put two and two together you can decrypt the whole thing and when this happened Assange directly contacted the white house saying that this data leak had occurred and something could come please be prepared but they just popped them off and didn't deal with the whole issue so it took a while and the complete unredacted materials were then published on krypton.org and there that site is located in the us it's a leak platform and from that platform you can still download the whole material and no one ever from the u.s. government contacted these people to take these material down and when this was published on krypton which leaks followed through and published it themselves but only later so any political motivation it could now suspect why it was nothing no action taking it as krypton.org and archive.org the way back machine still has a copy and that is still online they never heard from anyone to take this offline so it's all online but only WikiLeaks is being pursued as a consequence so that's just there to give you an overview of the situation about the expression case and also a very important topic and aspect which is very decisive for the decisions is a possible non extradition where medical experts and medical witnesses we were not given the written testimonials and there was not much report on that because it's very personal and that is why I also don't want to give too many details because it also concerns families and children which are not important for us here but it's also about depression and specific preparation so if that topic is difficult or triggering for you we advise you not to listen to the following part but I have to mention it so there was an expert who diagnosed julie nasance with aspergis which is a form of autism okay the audio is patchy again but we'll come back to autism and aspergis later because of the conditions of the u.s. secondly he was diagnosed with depression of medium severity and also the depression is very much dependent on his conditions of imprisonment when he was in prison in a prison clinic where he couldn't meet any other people his his health was mental health was very bad he was suicidal he was people said he looked like a ghost and especially of the in the u.s. of course is very much afraid of being extradited and of being isolated because of the way he was already treated the audio is patchy again so I mentioned one professor already a professor co-planned from peace college neuro psychotry professor which I already mentioned and he had wrote an expert opinion where he said that julie nasance got his hands on a razor blade in order to kill himself and the prosecution tried to undermine his testimonial by saying well it could have been that you just imagined that because it wasn't mentioned before and tried to gaslight him and say that wasn't part of the investigation before and then prosecute then defense gave him showed this piece of paper where the razor blade was found by in a search of the prison cell so it definitely existed there's proof of that and also it was it was clear that he was suicidal and it was incredible how prosecution tried to undermine the expert and undermine his expert opinion and the prosecution said that he didn't do his tests correctly it was a question whether the tests were inaccurate or whether he was just simulating so the prosecution basically tried anything to get a hold of any point it was very pointless in the end but very tiring so it's strange that professor said that the prosecution tried to pretend I was not an expert or worth this as an expert because before that they tried to hire me as an expert yeah they basically put them in their place like defense was able to put prosecution in their place and this is a citation from coperman he said I reiterate again that I'm a certain as a psychiatrist can ever be that in the event of imminent extradition Mr. Assange would indeed find a way to commit suicide and we all remember that Assange if he has his bad mental or physical health can't be extradited so I again have to reiterate how important this razor blade is and his mental health is and whether he's going to be considered as too unstable to be extradited so and the razor blade that is a fact they can't well I'm coming back to bad treatment in US prisons I want to introduce two witnesses who spoke in England officially there's no isolation in prison but there are so called Sam special administrators administrative measures if inmates are a suspect of having critical information that could endanger the state they can be applied and of course Julian Assange had many documents that were had not yet been pushed published that could endanger the US or could be deemed dangerous to the US and we talked to a former MCC this is a this is the prison where also a chapel was imprisoned and Jeffrey Epstein as well before well he died and this woman reported about the Sam measures they people are imprisoned for 23 hours isolated they can't see any other prisoners the guards don't talk to them and they have one hour of recreation a day where they can run in a circle that's it and then they're back to their cell that is the non-isolation in British prisons and we also took the lawyer of Abu Hamza who said that well he was um suspect of being a terrorist and also um prosecuted by the US where they um claimed that he was not in super prison not in Sam but still he was extradited to the US and in the US he was brought to super max prison and he wrote a letter to his son where he said tell my grandson that i love him and that was that was evaluated as a legal contact and he got in his eye he got graded up again and the same happened when he asked for his toenails to be clipped so uh we're running out of time but i would like to mention one more aspect because of the surveillance of the um embassy by UC global because um gillian assange lived in that embassy and he was um subject to extreme surveillance measures and we had testimonials of what happened there and david morales um said that they were now in premier league and there was proof of uh security cameras being exchanged now the audio is back off okay he's back um microphones were installed in the bathroom in the conference room just about anywhere and they were recording calls from where he talked to with this lawyer with priority and they took photos of him and his um lawyers they stole fingerprints and they made um handwriting analysis and they um even stole diapers in order to get a paternity test and also um patches were attached to the window that allowed them to intercept conversations and there were also um his broken his office was broken into and also um they concretely planned to assassinate him and also they um copied documents from the lawyers so this is like a criminal novel it all reads like a crime novel and all these years and julien assange was massively put under surveillance and that also affected his lawyers and it was clearly by done by the us so it is very questionable whether this is a fair proceeding okay just um to look at what is ahead of us both sides exchange written statements and the judge read those over christmas and will announce the verdict on fourth of january where i also requested to be present because i've been the only um political witness political observer who was present all the time but it was decided that no political observers are allowed from now on so this is where we come back to the beginning where i said that this is all very strange but i hope that will have access to media streams the press will have access to media streams i was repeatedly asked by the press to stop talking i will now do that i want i hope that i could give you a good and neutral overview of the proceedings there were many protesters in front of the court and um they were calling there's only one and um no extradition and i can only repeat that because it would not be a rule of law if that would happen thank you thank you for your presentation dustin unfortunately we don't have time for q and a but um dustin said that tomorrow he'll be present in a rc3 session details will follow on his twitter account you can follow him at dhbln follow him and he will tell you where and when you can you will have opportunities to ask questions i think there will be many questions after this fascinating presentation and we will get more answers on fourth of january thank you dustin for your presentation and we will our next presentation is on facial recognition so have a good evening