LONDON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 10th July, 2019) Supporters of jailed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who staged a picket outside the venue of the Global Conference for Media Freedom in London earlier on Wednesday, claimed that the UK government was engaging in "hypocrisy" in hosting such an event while holding the whistleblower in jail and actively discriminating Russian news outlets Sputnik and RT.
The two-day conference kicked off in the UK capital earlier in the day. The UK Foreign Office refused to accredit the two Russian news agencies over their alleged role in spreading "disinformation" without specifying any particular instances of this. When asked to provide specific examples of alleged disinformation, the Foreign Office referred Sputnik to UK media watchdog Ofcom, which earlier claimed that RT "broke broadcasting rules by failing to preserve due impartiality" in several episodes. In a wake of this UK move, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Tuesday that Moscow was giving London 24 hours to provide specific facts on the basis of which RT and Sputnik were denied accreditation to the conference.
The pro-Assange crowd earlier greeted conference guests with banners that read: "Media Freedom. What about Julian Assange?" "Free Assange. No U.S. Extradition," "Facing 175 Years For Exposing War Crimes."
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"It's a kind of weird situation, a bit like a parallel universe, I mean people are filing into a conference and past a sign that says 'defend media freedom' [in order] to be addressed by Jeremy Hunt whilst WikiLeaks publisher and journalist, Julian Assange, is in a maximum security prison in the same city. So it's just a kind of 'double think' situation as they would say in 1984," Ciaron O'Reilly, a member of the social justice Catholic Worker movement, told Sputnik at the scene.
O'Reilly also noted that "freedom of the media" should involve the freedom to report regardless of organizational affiliation. He therefore opined that the Foreign Office's decision to deny the Sputnik news agency and the RT broadcaster accreditation to the event over what it claimed was their "active role in spreading disinformation" was actually part of a broader denial of press freedom in the United Kingdom.
"When the title [of the conference] is about defending media freedom, that should include the freedom of the media to cover events, whatever media organization you're a part of. So it's both the reception of media and the production of media that are being denied today, to you [Sputnik] and to Julian Assange," he added.
Another activist at the scene, Peter Brinkley, claimed it was "absolutely hypocritical" for the government to hold a conference pertaining to global media freedom whilst Assange remained incarcerated in London's high-security Belmarsh prison.
He also queried Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt's role in endorsing and addressing the conference, arguing that the UK government's actions over Assange's imprisonment and possible extradition to the United States made him an unsuitable advocate for free journalism.
"It just beggars belief, it's just so hypocritical that they can do this [conference] whilst Julian Assange is in prison. He [Hunt] is in line to be possibly the next Prime Minister but he endorses the possibility that Julian might be extradited to America, with a sentence of 175 years hanging over his head," Brinkley told Sputnik.
He added that it was also "incredible that news networks like yourselves are banned from attending, which goes against the very essence of the conference, like freedom of the press and information."
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Speaking to Sputnik, David Miller, a professor of political sociology at the University of Bristol, similarly labeled it "a disgrace" that the UK government "parades itself as a defender of press freedom" whilst "Assange is incarcerated a short distance away." He also claimed that London itself actively encouraged its own form of misinformation at the expense of the public.
"It spends hundreds of millions of taxpayers money encouraging fake news and lies across the world in conflict spots, for example, in Syria, as well as spending unknown amounts in the millions focusing on the alleged problem of 'Russian disinformation'," Miller said.
According to the professor, the idea that Sputnik and RT are engaged in disinformation is "simply a propaganda line" from the UK Foreign Office and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).
"Their [the UK government's] risible efforts to counter alleged Russian disinformation via, for example, the Integrity Initiative and the Open Information Partnership have ended up denouncing actual humans as Russian bots, smearing independent academics - including myself - and, worst, attempting to smear the leader of Her Majesty's Opposition [Jeremy Corbyn]," he added, referring to the projects of the UK state-funded Institute for Statecraft.
Assange was arrested in London on April 11 after Ecuador revoked his asylum and let the British police enter its embassy in the UK capital. If extradited to the United States, the whistleblower will face up to 175 years in a US jail over espionage charges. On June 13, UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid said that he had signed the US request, with hearings of Assange's extradition case now scheduled for February 2020.
Despite public backlash around the possible extradition of Assange, whose whistleblowing website published a large number of classified documents exposing US abuses of power and war crimes in Afghanistan and Iran, his fate is off the media freedom conference's official agenda.
