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. He was sent to Belmarsh prison.

Assange was sentenced to 50 weeks in Belmarsh prison but has now served nearly three years

His crime was failing to surrender to custody seven years earlier, for which he was sentenced to 50 weeks. A month later, Melzer organised a visit to him in prison instead, along with two doctors to assess his well-being. Melzer describes the security, cell number 37, checking the examination room for cameras and microphones (he acknowledges this was probably futile) and meeting Assange for the first time:

My impression… was that of a highly intelligent, mentally extremely resilient man, who was desperately trying to retain some measure of control over his own fate, even though it was obvious that he was no longer in charge.