AN UNPRECEDENTED show of support for Julian Assange is due this Saturday when protesters form a human chain that will surround Parliament. Parliament has never been surrounded in this way before and organisers intend the demonstration to send an unmistakable message to MPs and to the world’s press that Assange should be set free.

The initiative has sparked a global day of solidarity with protests also taking place from America to Australia.

The UK protest will form in front of the Palace of Westminster and stretch over Westminster Bridge, along the south bank of the Thames, and back over Lambeth Bridge. 

The event comes at a vital moment in Julian Assange’s legal battle against extradition to the US where he could face 175 years in jail for publishing the truth about the Afghan and Iraq wars.

Former Home Secretary Priti Patel signed the extradition request from the US government earlier this year. But Assange’s lawyers have launched an appeal against that decision with the High Court. They are now awaiting the court’s decision on whether or not it will hear the appeal.

That’s why the protest comes at a vital moment. It’s essential that the court both agrees to hear the appeal and that it decides to overturn the extradition request.

There is still time to overturn the extradition and there is still road to run in the British courts. But the initial court hearings in the Magistrates Court and the appeal courts have been exhausted so it  is hugely important that the political pressure on the government and the courts is redoubled at this moment.

There could not be more at stake in a single court case than there is in the Assange case. The right of journalists to report the facts that governments and corporations don’t wish to have revealed will be virtually criminalised if the prosecution of Assange is successful.

The authoritarian instincts of the new Tory Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, are, almost unbelievably, more extreme than those of her predecessor, Priti Patel.

The continued persecution of Assange, now in his fourth year in Belmarsh prison, is part of a wider attack on civil liberties by the Tories.

The government plans greater powers for the police to curb political protest, a raft of anti-union legislation which will make it virtually impossible to organise a legal and effective strike, a new official secrets act, and new limitations on freedom of speech. 

Success for the Tories in extraditing Julian Assange will embolden them in every other attack they are making on civil liberties and trade union rights. That’s why its in the interest of every trade unionist, everyone who cares about preserving civil liberties, to join the human chain protest this Saturday.

The National Union of Journalists, and the International Federation of Journalists which represents 300,000 members worldwide, are supporting the protests. So is Amnesty International. Kevin Courtney, the joint general secretary of the teachers’ union, the NEU, has added his voice to the call. And he’s been joined by film directors Ken Loach and Oliver Stone, musicians Brian Eno, Lowkey, and Roger Waters, MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Richard Burgon, and the president of the Muslim Association of Britain, Raghad Al Tikriti.

There is now a growing consensus that the Assange extradition is a wholly unjustified assault on freedom of the press. Moreover, the revelations during the extradition hearings themselves have raised the gravest doubts about the legality of the process itself.

In the course of the court hearings it has become public knowledge that a lead witness for the prosecution lied, that Assange and his lawyers were spied on by the CIA, and that the CIA discussed at the highest levels plans to abduct or assassinate Assange. 

In any normal trial any one of these, let alone all of them, would have had the case dismissed.

That has not happened in the Assange case because there is too much at stake in the “special relationship” between the US and British governments. It is this above all else that marks the Assange case out as a political trial.

In a political trial it is crucial that political pressure outside the courtroom is brought to bear to halt the abuse of the legal system that takes place in the courtroom.

That’s why the surround Parliament protest this Saturday is so important and it is why that protest must become the springboard for renewed and intensified campaigns to free Assange this autumn.