Is Julian Assange on a hiding to nothing?

A question looms throughout this book: is it better to die rather than experience the wrath of a publicly shamed America?

The story begins in 2018 when Nils Melzer, a UN Special Rapporteur on torture, received an email: ‘Julian Assange is seeking your protection.’ Melzer’s office receives approximately 50 requests for help each week, and he was initially dismissive of this one. He believed the founder of WikiLeaks was ‘hiding out in an embassy somewhere because of rape allegations’. A few months later, Assange’s lawyers made contact again. This time Melzer read the documents forwarded to him and changed his mind: ‘I began to wake up to my own prejudice.’

That was in 2019, and Assange’s lawyers feared their client was about to be booted out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London and extradited to ‘the blackhole of a US supermax prison’ — Melzer’s words. With permission from the British government, Melzer arranged to visit Assange at the embassy; but two weeks before his scheduled meeting it opened its doors and the British police arrested Assange.