WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has written a letter to the newly crowned King Charles III. Assange has invited the King to visit the Belmarsh prison in London where he has been confined for more than four years.
On Monday, official Twitter account of Wikileaks tweeted a report by Firstpost.com which contained snapshots of the letter’s contents. The video report also contains footage of fans, activists and civil society members requesting the release of Assange.
At one point in the video, Prime Minister of Australia says “I am concerned about Mr. Assange’s mental health”.
“On the coronation of my liege, I thought it only fitting to extend a heartfelt invitation to you to commemorate this momentous occasion by visiting your very own kingdom within a kingdom: his majesty’s prison Belmarsh,” writes Assange in the letter to the King.
“One can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners, and your kingdom has surely excelled in that regard. It is here that 687 of your loyal subjects are held, supporting the United Kingdom’s record as the nation with the largest prison population in Western Europe,” reads the letter.
Notably, Assange is embroiled in a bitter legal battle against USA which attempts to extradite him to file charges for his role in the publication of numerous leaked documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars as well as diplomatic cables.
In the letter, Assange has also taken a sarcastic dig at the quality of food being served at the prison. He has also highlighted a horrendous incident in which a prisoner near his cell, committed suicide.
“As a political prisoner, held at your majesty’s pleasure on behalf of an embarrassed foreign sovereign, I am honoured to reside within the walls of this world class institution,” reads the letter further.
“Beyond the gustatory pleasures … you will also have the opportunity to pay your respects to my late friend Manoel Santos, a gay man facing deportation to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, who took his own life just eight yards from my cell using a crude rope fashioned from his bedsheets,” writes Assange.
Assange also indirectly requests for mercy from the King by quoting a line from King James Bible.
“Listen closely, and you may hear the prisoners’ cries of ‘Brother, I’m going to die in here’, a testament to the quality of both life and death within your prison,” writes Assange.
“I implore you, King Charles, to visit His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh, for it is an honour befitting a king.As you embark upon your reign, may you always remember the words of the King James Bible: ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy’. And may mercy be the guiding light of your kingdom, both within and without the walls of Belmarsh,” the letter reads.
Interestingly, Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had requested the release of Assange, after attending the coronation of King Charles III in London.
“It is an embarrassment that a journalist who denounced trickery by one state against another is arrested, condemned to die in jail and we do nothing to free him. It’s a crazy thing. We talk about freedom of expression; the guy is in prison because he denounced wrongdoing. And the press doesn’t do anything in defense of this journalist. I can’t understand it,” Lula told reporters.