In November 2019, I arrived at the gates of Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh in South East London. Since 2001, the UK government has run Belmarsh as the “British Guantanamo Bay,” detaining prisoners without charge on trial on the basis of extraordinary anti-terror laws passed in the course of the “war on terror.” Two decades later, neither Guantanamo nor Belmarsh have closed. On the contrary, it is at Belmarsh that the UK government today imprisons the man who dared to reveal the crimes of the war on terror, the man I came to meet on that late autumn day in 2019: Julian Assange.

It has been ten years since WikiLeaks began publishing the “Guantanamo Files,” documenting the detention and torture of prisoners by the United States government at its prison on Cuba’s occupied east coast. But the architects and administrators of the Guantanamo Bay torture camp today walk free. Instead, the journalists, whistleblowers, and publishers have been sent to prison. Assange has now spent over a thousand days in solitary confinement at Belmarsh as the UK courts debate his extradition to face a 175-year prison sentence in the United States.

The Belmarsh Tribunal — which sits today for its third session — turns the tables on the Assange extradition case. On the twentieth anniversary of Guantanamo Bay’s opening, the Progressive International is bringing witnesses from around the world to give testimony to the crimes of the war on terror when no court of law will hear them.