Stella Assange grew up in Southern Africa before moving to Sweden, Spain, and then the UK for her tertiary education where she studied politics and law (SOAS, Oxford). She met Julian Assange in London in 2011 when she joined his international legal team. They have two children together (born 2017 and 2019). Stella and Julian married in March 2022 in Belmarsh high-security prison in south-east London.
Diane Bernard is a lawyer and philosopher. After several research mandates in Belgium and abroad (notably at Harvard, in 2014-15), she is currently a professor at the Université Saint-Louis - Brussels. Diane Bernard co-directs the Séminaire Interdisciplinaire d'Etudes Juridiques, a recognised research centre that has been developing a critical and interdisciplinary study of contemporary law since 1973; for the past year, the collective work carried out there has been devoted to the links between law and truth. Editor-in-chief of the Revue Interdisciplinaire d'Etudes Juridiques, member of various editorial committees, promoter of several theses and scientific projects, author and editor of numerous publications, she devotes her research in general legal theory to feminist approaches, articulating philosophy, law, sociology and psychoanalysis. She is also administrator of Fem&LAW, an association of feminist lawyers.
Rafael Vicente Correa Delgado is an Ecuadorian economist and statesman, President of the Republic from 15 January 2007 to 24 May 2017. In 2012, Ecuador granted political asylum to Julian Assange, who had taken refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London when the United States asked for him to be extradited.
Laurent Dauré is a freelance journalist and translator. He is particularly interested in Western geopolitics, media criticism and how propaganda works. A specialist in the Assange affair, he coordinated the publication of the book Julian Assange et WikiLeaks: le combat du siÚcle pour la liberté d'informer (Les Mutins de Pangée, 2021). He is a founding member of the Assange Support Committee (France).
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie is a sociologist and philosopher. He is a professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Arts de Paris-Cergy. He is the author of L'Art de la révolte. Snowden, Assange, Mannning
Baltasar Garzón is a Spanish lawyer and politician. He is known abroad as an investigating judge for his investigations into terrorism, corruption and crimes committed in Argentina and Chile by the dictatorships. His proceedings have brought him sympathy but also legal trouble: in 2012 he was suspended from the judiciary for eleven years by the Spanish Supreme Court for ordering the illegal listening and recording of discussions between jailed suspects and their lawyers. Garzón gained international notoriety by issuing an arrest warrant for former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to hear his case on the death and torture of Spanish citizens following the 1973 coup in Chile. The prosecution was based on the report of the Chilean Truth Commission (1990-1991), as well as on a cable from FBI agent Robert Scherrer concerning Operation Condor. After Pinochet's death, he continued to investigate money laundering during the dictatorship. It was in this process that he also tried to hear former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger about his dealings with the authoritarian regimes in Latin America in the 1970s and what became known as 'Operation Condor'. Garzón brought genocide charges against Argentine officials for the disappearance of Spanish citizens during the Argentine dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. In April 2001, he asked the Council of Europe to exclude Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi as a member of the Council's parliamentary assembly (investigation into his Telecinco). In December 2001, Garzón started an investigation into the foreign accounts of Spain's second largest bank BBVA, for the crime of money laundering. In January 2003, the magistrate criticised the US government for detaining al-Qaeda suspects at the Guantånamo military base in Cuba. He also campaigned against the 2003 Iraq war.
Kristinn Hrafnsson is an Icelandic investigative journalist. He is the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. He was the spokesperson for WikiLeaks from 2010 to 2017.
Christophe Marchand is a lecturer in Public International Law at the ULB and a former member of the board of the Belgian Human Rights League. He has represented the Belgian Bar Association in discussing new legal measures in criminal law at government and parliamentary level, and is involved in regular cooperation with two important human rights organisations in particular: Fair Trials International (London) and the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR - Berlin). He led the defence team that secured the conviction of Belgium in a key case related to the use of evidence obtained under torture (El Haski v Belgium, ECHR, 25.09.2012). He also won the following cases related to extradition, police violence or violence against women: Ouabour v. Belgium, ECHR (2015), Bouid v. Belgium, ECHR (2015), BV v. Belgium, ECHR (2017), de Moffarts v. Belgium, ECHR (2017), Prisacaru v. Belgium, ECHR (2018). With his partners at Jus Cogens, he pleaded and obtained the condemnation of Morocco (UN Committee against Torture, 22.05.2014) and Spain (UN Human Rights Committee, 28.08.2014) in the case of a Belgian-Moroccan national illegally extradited by Spain to Morocco, tortured by Morocco, and left in Moroccan gaols without consular assistance from the Belgian embassy. Christophe Marchand has also litigated asylum cases, including before the European Court of Justice (Lounani v Belgium, 2017). He has extensive experience in litigating international extradition cases, including at Interpol or other international level, representing for example Julian Assange, the Catalan government in exile or President Rafael Correa and former members of his government or persecuted political group. He also works with his team on issues related to the reparation of Belgian colonial crimes in Congo (assassination of former Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and plundering of cultural and economic wealth).
Stefania Maurizi is an investigative journalist currently contributing to the major Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano, after working for the last 14 years for la Repubblica, consistently rated among the top two Italian newspapers, and for lâEspresso, the most important Italian newsmagazine. She has worked with Julian Assange and his organisation âWikiLeaksâ since 2009, teaming up with large teams of international media to cover and investigate all WikiLeaks' secret documents: from the secret files on the war in Afghanistan (Afghan War Logs) to the US diplomacy cables (Cablegate), from the files on the Guantanamo detainees (Gitmo Files) on up to the most recent revelations about the European military mission against boats travelling from Libya to Italy smuggling migrants and refugees and the espionage activities against French and the European leaders by the National Security Agency (Nsa). She worked with US journalist Glenn Greenwald on the top secret files leaked by Edward Snowden concerning Italy and headed the journalistic research for âSnowden's Great Escapeâ, a documentary film coproduced by the German and Danish public broadcasters, âNdrâ and âDrâ respectively. She investigated serious cases of environmental pollution, the harsh conditions of the Pakistani workers working in a major Italian garment factory based in Pakistan, the serious problems of the Italian nuclear decommissioning programme, and interviewed the elusive A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani atomic bomb.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi was born in Rosso, Mauritania, the ninth of twelve children of a camel herder. His family moved to the capital of Nouakchott when he was a child, where he attended school and earned a scholarship to study electrical engineering at Gerhard-Mercator University in Duisburg / Germany. In 2001, he was living and working in his home country of Mauritania when he was detained and renditioned to Jordan, beginning an ordeal that he would chronicle in his internationally-bestselling GuantĂĄnamo Diary. The manuscript, which he wrote in his isolation cell in the detention camp at GuantĂĄnamo Bay, Cuba, remained classified for almost eight years and was finally released, with substantial redactions, in 2013. It was first published in the United States and United Kingdom in January, 2015, and has since been published in twenty-five languages. After fifteen years of detention, Mohamedou was released on October 17th, 2016 to Mauritania. The following year he published a ârestored editionâ of GuantĂĄnamo Diary, filling in the U.S. governmentâs redactions, and in February 2021 his first novel, The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga, published by Ohio University Press. Since January 2022 Writer in residence with NNT/NITE and De Balie, The Netherlands
Julien Pieret has a doctorate in legal sciences and has been a lecturer at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of the University Libre of Brussels since 2012 and director of the Centre for Public and Social Law of the same university since 2018. He teaches Public Law, Legal Research Methodology and a course on the joint study of law and social movements. His main research topics include the study of the militant uses of law, feminist criticism of law and the European protection of freedom of expression. Julien Pieret is particularly active in several Belgian civil society organisations (Ligue des droits humains, Liaison anti-prohibitionniste, Comité de vigilance en travail social, etc.).
Denis Robertâs work includes novels, essays, investigative journalism and documentaries. Begin 80âs he joined the editorial staff of the monthly magazine Actuel, and participated in the launch of the Rolling Stone of the 80âs. He was a journalist for the daily newspaper LibĂ©ration from 1982 to 1995. In 1996, he wrote Pendant les affaires, les affaires continuent. That same year, he brought together seven leading anti-corruption magistrates to launch "THE GENEVA CALL": for the creation of a European judicial area, with the aim of fighting financial crime. Follow Revolte.com, a book of interviews with Noam Chomsky and a dozen essays and stories such as Larry et moi published at the end of 2020. He directs documentaries: Journal Intime des affaires en cours in 1998, Histoire clandestine de ma rĂ©gion in 2002 or JusquâĂ lâultime seconde jâĂ©crirai in 2018. He is the author of ten novels such as Une ville, Le bonheur or Les rapports humains published in late 2018. From 1999 to 2002, Denis Robert investigated the CLEARSTREAM company. In 2001, his book RĂ©vĂ©lation$ and his film Les dissimulateurs revealed the existence of this multinational finance company based in Luxembourg, whose name was unknown to the general public until then. In 2004, this company found itself at the centre of a state manipulation that pitted Nicolas Sarkozy against Dominique de Villepin in the presidential race. Prosecuted "for handling stolen bank secrets" by the French justice system in the trial between Nicolas Sarkozy and Dominique de Villepin, he was acquitted in January 2010. In 2012, he created Citizen Films, a documentary film production company. Since 2006, he has held several exhibitions in various art galleries. In 2019, he took over the management of Le MĂ©dia that he left in September 2020 and created a collaborative and cooperative project, the SCIC Blast, le souffle de l'info, which carries the new online press service blast-info.fr and a new WebTV Blast, le souffle de l'info accessible to all.
Jennifer Robinson is a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers with a broad practice across media law, public law, international law and extradition. Prior to joining chambers, Jen Robinson was a solicitor in the media and international team at Finers Stephens Innocent LLP, acting in key freedom of speech and freedom of information cases on behalf of media organisations, journalists and human rights organisations. She advised on a wide range of media law issues, including defamation, privacy, contempt, freedom of information, national security and reporting restrictions, and intervened regularly on behalf of the media in strategic cases before UN bodies, the European Court of Human Rights and the English courts. Alongside legal practice, Jennifer Robinson has taught at the University of Sydney on the social justice clinical program. She also created the Bertha Justice Initiative, a global program and network to support emerging lawyers into public interest law, providing support and advice to lawyers conducting strategic public law and human rights litigation.
Annemie Schaus is president of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, has a doctorate in law, a degree in law and a special degree in international law. She is a member of the Centre for Public Law, where she was director (2001-2007), and an associate member of the Centre for International Law. She was Dean of the Faculty of Law (September 2007 - January 2011) and Vice-Rector for Institutional Relations and Knowledge Transfer (2010-2012), as well as for Academic Policy at the Free University of Brussels (2012-2016). Annemie Schaus is a member of the Advisory Board of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, an international NGO based in Berlin. At the University Libre of Brussels, Annemie Schaus teaches at the Faculty of Law and Criminology, Rights and Freedoms, Intersections between Domestic and International Law and coordinates a Rights and Freedoms Clinic, awarded the 2019 Socrates Prize.
Derek Summerfield Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer, King's College London. Visiting Lecturer, National University of Science & Technology School of Medicine, Zimbabwe. Formerly: Principal Psychiatrist, Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture, London. Consultant to Oxfam re programmes in war-affected areas. Research Associate, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. War-related fieldwork in Nicaragua, Gaza, Zimbabwe. 200+ academic publications. Campaigner for Palestinian rights and against medical complicity with torture in Israel.
Françoise Tulkens is a professor emeritus at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of the University of Leuven, and an associate member of the Royal Academy of Belgium. She is a specialist in criminal law and procedure as well as youth protection and has published several reference works on the subject, bringing to her work a comparative dimension resulting from her research stays in foreign universities, in particular American and Canadian. From 1998 to 2012, she was a judge at the European Court of Human Rights, where she was Vice-President from 2011 to 2012. Throughout her career, Françoise Tulkens has endeavoured to give a concrete basis to her scientific activities through societal commitments. She was President of the Ligue des droits de l'homme de Belgique francophone from 1996 to 1998, and of the King Baudouin Foundation from 2012 to 2016. More recently, she participated in the United Nations Advisory Committee for Human Rights in Kosovo (2012-2016) and chaired the Commission of Experts in charge of evaluating Belgian anti-discrimination legislation. In 2017, she chaired the International Tribunal organised by civil society in The Hague to examine Monsanto's responsibilities for human rights and environmental violations and in 2021 she chaired the Turkey Tribunal in Geneva on the violation of human rights in Turkey.
Support -
- Nils Melzer - Former UN special Rapporteur on torture - Director of International Law, Policy and Humanitarian Diplomacy at the ICRC
- Noam Chomsky - Linguist and philosopher
- Daniel Ellsberg - PhD in economics, military analyst & whistleblower
- Brian Eno - Musician
- Renaud Herbin - Director of TJP - Centre Dramatique national de Strasbourg Grand-Est
- Eva Joly - Member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2019
- Stanislas Nordey - Director of TNS - Théùtre National de Strasbourg
- Sabrina Pignedoli - Italian journalist & Member of the European Parliament
- Dominique Pradalié - President of the IFJ - International Federation of Journalists
- Milo Rau - Director of NTGent, writer & stage director
- Katia Roux - Amnesty France
- Cédric Villani - French mathematician & politician
Thanks -
Julian Assange, Baptiste Bérard Proust, Martin Corten, Bruno Ferrand, Marie Laurence Hébert-Dolbec, Renaud Herbin, Nancy Hollander, Beatriz Gutierrez, Lidia Izossimova, Stella Marc-Zwecker, Christophe Marchand, Aitor Martinez, Nils Melzer, Andy Mueller-Maguhn, Stanislas Nordey, Dominique Pradalié, Séverine Provost, Milo Rau, Chantal Regairaz, Katia Roux, Mathilde Roux, Mdeen Savage, Chloé Schlosberg, Cyrille Siffer, Nathalie Trotta, Audrey Ujeneza, Ralph Vankrinkelveldt, Delphine Verger, Antoine Vey & les équipes du TJP et du TNS.