Activists come out against political persecution in the West

A newly founded network of human rights activists has held an online conference, taking up the cause of imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange and other victims of political or religious persecution, Tara Reade told RT on Thursday.

The group called Re:Union organized the video conference from a hub in Serbia, featuring more than 15 speakers from across the world. Reade, a former US Senate staffer who sought asylum in Russia last month, was one of the dissidents invited to address the forum.

The conference referred to Assange as one of the examples of the West violating the right to free expression. The WikiLeaks publisher has been held in a maximum-security British prison since April 2019, when Ecuador revoked his asylum and the US unsealed Espionage Act accusations that would see him imprisoned for 175 years if convicted. Assange has defended his 2010 publication of US military documents related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as basic journalism.

Reade told RT she was invited to testify about her own persecution in the US. She has accused current US President Joe Biden of sexual assault back when she was his aide in the Senate, and criticized the current Ukraine conflict as being a “US-NATO proxy war against Russia.”

She also noted that the government of Ukraine, celebrated by the US and its allies as champion of democracy, has in fact outlawed over a dozen opposition parties and all opposition media, while persecuting the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

Reade brought up the recent testimony of an FBI whistleblower, about how the US government has targeted traditional Catholics as dangerous “extremists” at home. Arriving in Russia, she said, was “the first time I felt safe in so long.”

Re:Union organized the video conference to introduce some of the speakers and pave the way for the ‘Free European Nations Forum’, a conference scheduled for October in Moscow. 

According to the group, the forum will welcome activists who disagree with the current political agenda in the US and the EU, offering “not a fight against the system” but a “revision of rules and relations” that would see all opinions get their due respect.

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