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Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says he’ll stress the US to drop expenses towards Julian Assange
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says the image of America’s freedom might lose its that means if Washington refuses to drop expenses towards Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange, who faces the prospect of 175 years in jail.
“In the event that they take him to the US and he’s sentenced to the utmost penalty and to die in jail, we should begin a marketing campaign to tear down the Statue of Liberty,” Lopez Obrador stated at a information convention on Monday. For Washington to convict Assange would affirm that the world-famous monument in New York Harbor “is not an emblem of freedom,” he continued.
His statements got here within the wake of criticism revealed over the weekend by the Washington Put up and NGO Reporters With out Borders excoriating the Mexican authorities for its supposed failure to guard journalists. The reporters’ advocacy group has referred to as on the Mexican authorities to “overhaul mechanisms for shielding media personnel,” insisting nearly all of the 12 journalists who’ve been killed to this point this yr in Mexico have been murdered due to their work.
Nevertheless, the president, who’s extensively identified by his initials AMLO, dismissed the report as “a smear marketing campaign towards the federal government of Mexico.”
The Mexican chief skewered what he framed as hypocrisy by the media organizations that eagerly revealed info on US struggle crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq obtained and launched by Wikileaks earlier than turning towards the group’s founder.
“When this info was launched, numerous media participated [in its publication]. They agreed to launch all the data as a result of they thought of that it was a contribution to the protection of human rights, to freedom of expression, to not proceed with the double discuss, with the lies, with saying one factor and doing one other,” he stated.
Lopez Obrador had informed reporters final month that he would broach the topic of dropping the costs towards Assange throughout his subsequent assembly with US President Joe Biden. He was invited to talk with the US president after he declined an invite to Biden’s Summit of the Americas, refusing to attend in protest of the occasion’s exclusion of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.
The Wikileaks writer’s attorneys filed two new appeals final week to contest his extradition to the US. He faces 18 counts of conspiracy to acquire and launch categorized materials and Espionage Act violations stemming from receiving top-secret army paperwork from army analyst Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning in 2010. That’s regardless of one of many key witnesses within the case towards Assange admitting that he fabricated essential components of his testimony towards the Wikileaks co-founder.
READ MORE:
Julian Assange appeals extradition to US – WSJ
Assange has been successfully confined since 2012, when he sought asylum within the Ecuadorian embassy in London, looking for to keep away from extradition to Sweden the place he confronted doubtful sexual assault expenses which have since been dismissed. Quito revoked his asylum in 2019, and the British police transferred him from the embassy to the maximum-security Belmarsh jail, the place he has remained ever since, his well being and psychological state reportedly deteriorating quickly.
Whereas Lopez Obrador has floated the thought of providing Assange political asylum a number of instances, he has not made an express provide to this point.
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