 Doctors for Assange is a group of roughly 300 doctors in over 30 countries on all continents, so of international scope. What really spurred it on was, you know, the removal of Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in April of 19 and the subsequent finding of the special repertoire on torture that Julian Assange had been tortured. And then evidence of that torture was displayed by Assange at the first phase, well not even the first phase of his extradition hearing yet, but it's some hearings that fall. And so the first letter that Doctors for Assange wrote was to the Australian government and then another letter to the UK government. And several letters sent since we've constantly been advocating that Assange is tortured. Assange must be released from prison and cared for at a teaching hospital of a university and that his legal persecution and the conditions in the prison are contributory per the special repertoire to his torture. And the only way to treat him as a victim of torture is to remove him from his conditions. And then also when the COVID pandemic broke out, he's obviously at grave risk. Prisons are breeding grounds for infectious diseases and, you know, he should have been released on bail at minimum last March and we wrote a response to that decision condemning it. And so that's been sort of the main message of Doctors for Assange and a brief history. We have two Lancet letters in the leading medical journal in the UK and possibly probably the world. And so that's our message. That's our advocacy. That's what we're insisting on and continue to insist on. Thanks. My name is Thomas Schultz. I'm a professor of psychiatry at the University of Munich in Germany and in Syracuse, upstate New York. And I came on board last year, middle of last year. I had been following the case more as a private citizen, I think, as many of us like many of us. But of course, as a doctor, I have a different angle from which I look at case like this. And of course, I then learned about the work of Doctors for Assange and I realized, oh, this is this is great. And I definitely have to support them. So how that's how I came on board. And through the work, I learned more about this case. I learned about everything that had been going on in these 10 years. And what was really amazing or an eye-opener was the report by Niels Meltzer, the UN Special Recreateur in Torture. And he's a well-respected figure in this field. And he himself said, look, I didn't want to go into that. I thought Assange was kind of a strange and weirdo and maybe it was right that he was in prison or so. But then when he went through all these documents, he realized something is wrong here. And I'm not talking about any legal aspects. I'm not a legal scholar. I'm a doctor like Bill. And we look at that from, you know, we never really take an oath, but people think of that we take an oath. But there is an internal oath that of course we have that is helping people and be crying horrible things when they are happening all over the world. And in this case, we clearly see that there is torture and the torture was reported. People say, well, how do you know? Well, we have the evidence from a respected person in this field, Niels Meltzer. And he examined Julian with two experts who I personally know. I'm also on the Executive Board of the World Psychiatric Association. We had a section on the impact of torture and the then chair of that section, the Catalan psychiatrist, Pao Perez-Sales, was one of the two who interviewed, we examined Julian Assange. So I know him. He's a very respected scholar in the field. And the other Dr. Duarte Vieira, Nuno Vieira, I know him well. Also he is also very well known in this field. He looks more at the bodily harm. So we have evidence to an independent evidence that there was torture, there was evidence of torture. There's psychological damage visible. And as doctors, we have to decry this. And this is going on. And what we are saying is get him out. He needs to be treated. And it has been going on in 10 years of confinement within the embassy, which was not voluntary because he had to. You know, it's like an asylum seeker, he had to flee from prosecution. So and the way he was treated there, medical, there's sort of a medical neglect and surveillance and so forth that contributed to torture. And now the issue is, in case he's extradited to these prison conditions that he might likely be under, is there a high risk of committing suicide? Sure, there is. I mean, I went through the court document and I think, you know, all these psychiatrists from both the prosecution side and the defense, I think they agree there is a mental health issue. The question is how you interpret that. But I think there's overwhelming, there's more overall evidence that these conditions that he would expect there would definitely cause, would pose a great risk of suicide. And certainly the Sange is no stranger to special administrative measures and how torture detainees or how terror detainees in Guantanamo are treated in the history of the United States. And given his publications, he's fully aware of the wretched conditions and the fact that the judge in the extradition hearing, who was otherwise barreling down the tracks to agreeing with everything the prosecution said, held up and made a decision not to extradite based on mental health grounds, speaks not only to a Sange's mental state, but just the absolutely reprehensible and horrible conditions in U.S. prisons. As an American, you know, the typical American, I think I used to be fairly typical, you know, you sort of aware of the international condemnation and shock that we still have a death penalty and that we imprison so much of our population. But I didn't fully come to appreciate just how bad it was until this judge, until I read about special administrative measures as described by John Kariaku and others. And so the one thing that the judge couldn't fathom was sending him to the United States because of its horrible, horrible prison regime. So that was an eye-opener, but also his mental state really is that bad. He's, you know, as Thomas so eloquently pointed out, this torture is a fact. It's a fact established by medical and legal experts. The two medical experts, a company, Niels Meltzer, examined the Sange independently and then talked about their conclusions. So they both independently arrived at the same conclusion that day. The fact that Meltzer was even there was because an American physician, Dr. Sandra Crosby, was concerned about torture. She's also an expert in this area in assessing victims of torture. And so anybody who wants to try and dismiss it as well, it's just bad, you know, nobody likes prison. No, this is much worse than that. This is an actual medically established fact of torture that has not been disputed. No one else who has done a medical assessment of a Sange has come to a different conclusion or disputed the diagnosis. There is actually an international diagnostic code for victim of torture. So this is, you know, medically established fact. And also in the extradition hearing, we learned new things about his mental health. We learned he has a form of autism called Asperger's syndrome. We learned, you know, a lot of the reporters hated to report on some of these very personal and private details of a Sange's medical history. And so I, you know, want to respect that as well, but he was diagnosed with Asperger's and he has had a number of other symptomatologies that clearly established that his severe, severe depression and his risk of suicide is high. And given his high level of intelligence and creativity and ingenuity, the judge was convinced he could indeed and probably and almost certainly would find a way to kill himself. I would just like to add, well, thanks, Bill. One important fact, I think in the non, the non-psychiatric experts or the legal experts, they think, well, you treat it, right? I mean, if you have a heart, a high blood pressure, you take pills and that lowers the blood pressure or you have diabetes, you take insulin or, you know, keep diet and that's it. But here I think the lawyers like the prosecutor, the prosecutor's side, they might argue, well, we can treat that, you know, we have antidepressants and if there's psychosis, hallucinations, delusions, well, we give anti-psychotics. Well, first of all, if it were that easy, no psychiatric patient would not, would commit suicide under, under appropriate appropriate medication. Unfortunately, that's awful for psychiatrists to admit, but that's, that's a reality. Patients, patients with psychiatric disorders do commit suicide, even under treatment because there is no magic, there's no silver bullet here to cure this. There's no cure. You can only control symptoms, but you cannot predict what will happen in one's mind. So the, the idea that you treat some of you throw medication at someone and that will remove the risk of suicide, independent of all the likely horrible prison conditions is, is, is not. I mean, no psychiatrist would ever say, yeah, 100% guarantee there will be no, no suicide. And also we have learned that there's a family history and I, you know, I do psychiatric genetics research that's what I've been doing for 22 years. Two of his uncles, I think, committed suicide. There's a history of depression. He was treated for mental first psychiatric disorders before. So you already have a strong genetic background. You cannot remove that. Then you have the environmental external factors and they would be aggravated. That is the prison conditions that he would likely face. But again, I would like to say that any prosecuted things, well, we can treat that we have prison psychiatrists, just give a medication that will take care of it and he will be, you know, and just a regular treatment that's, that's sorry that that's not how it works because if that were the case, every patient that psychiatrists treat would never ever commit suicide, which is not the case. And this is very important to note because the United States has announced it's attention to appeal the extradition decision on this basis that they can manage the suicide risk in various ways. So, you know, they're almost certainly I think they've already filed their appeal. I don't think the documents are public yet. But they're almost certain to argue that the severity of the diagnosis is exaggerated. And that they'll come up with some way to mitigate somehow the risk of suicide and mitigate the prison conditions in his case. Maybe they'll relax a little bit, but I got the impression they were going to double down on special administrative measures, which is shocking and horrifying under special administrative measures as karaoke pointed out you can't talk to anybody but your lawyers, trying to get a message out to an unapproved message recipient, typically under special administrative measures, you're allowed to get a message out to only two or three people other than your lawyers and try to get a message out to someone else. You can be disciplined severely, one detainee under special administrative prisoner under special administrative measures, tried to ask his son to tell his grandson that he loved him and that's not allowed. So this is how inhumane and cruel and unbelievably wretched special administrative measures are and that the United States wouldn't back off on that. Just shows how cruel and vindictive and hateful this prosecution this persecution is and just how unbelievably shocking a regime it is it's it's it's hard to put in words. Thank you so much for those interventions and for the advocacy by doctors for assigned the work that you do and the expert opinions that you've been giving with your white coats on just has a disproportionate impact. Given the respect held for the medical profession but also the standards of evidence that you are echoing. I have to agree with you. As someone monitoring the court case for a month it was like really deeply shocking. I thought I couldn't be shocked anymore when it came to this case but the descriptions of Sam's and of the facilities in the US particularly the one called Florence the inhuman conditions were deeply shocking and and as someone who knows Julian well and who's visited him in Belmarsh of course it's upsetting to hear about his deterioration and his suffering. He is a strong person but only the very strongest kind of people can can can withstand such such a long suffering that he's endured.