I THINK the top three leaders in the world today are Irfaan Ali of Guyana, Mia Mottley of Barbados and President Lula of Brazil. I cannot find any president or prime minister from the world as having a more humane, progressive world outlook than these three leaders.

Barbados and Guyana are not geo-strategic, geo-political players on the global stage. They have small populations and small economies that do not allow them to penetrate the fortress of Western hegemony. Furthermore, stepping out too far can bring retaliation from which they do not have the required international canopy of protection.

Guyana is in a more sensitive mode than Barbados. We live with an authoritarian leader next to us who rigs elections and wants to use annexation claims of Guyanese territory to strengthen his non-existent acceptance among the Venezuelan people. Guyana then does not have wide latitude to act as a voice against hegemonic manoeuvres in international affairs.

Of the three, Brazil is far better equipped to confront global wrong-doings from powerful countries. President Lula has, on more than one occasion, called for the release of Julian Assange. But I believe he should be more forceful and consistent in his advocacy.
The leader who is forceful and consistent in his request for the freeing of Julian Assange is the Australian Prime Minister. Now it looks like his inexorability will pay off. President Biden has announced that he is considering dropping charges against Assange. My thinking of the situation is that he will because of the election coming up.

What we must stress is that Assange’s arrest was as a result of a request by President Donald Trump. How could the world condemn Trump when he was in power, when he is out of power and now that he is running again for office and refuses to see that Assange was a victim of the vindictive politics of Trump? If you conclude that Trump was vindictive and a right-wing zealot when he was in power, then how can you not see the connection between Assange’s arrest and the authoritarian policies of Trump?

Yet Assange has been kept in a high-security prison in the UK for four years after Trump lost the presidency. It calls into focus how different is the Democratic Party leadership from the Republican Party. What we must never lose sight of are a few glaring facts. Assange never worked or lived in the US so he never revealed classified information as a US citizen.

Secondly, the documents Assange received and released were given to him by an American security employee at the time – Chelsea Manning – who was charged for that act and pardoned by President Obama. Thirdly, Assange gave the documents to some of the leading newspapers in the world that published them. It was through the Manning-Assange connection and those newspapers that the world knows about what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If Manning is freed and the war data have been published, it has been argued extensively that Assange’s arrest does not make sense. He was not an American employee that engaged in spying but that is what he has been charged with by the Trump administration.

There are other dimensions of the Assange tragedy that need highlighting. He has been denied bail and is in a UK prison for five years now and has lost all of his appeals for acquittal against extradition. Enter the Privy Council (PC). After more than 50 years of Independence, some CARICOM nations still retain the PC in London as their final court of appeal.

Why the PC? When the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) was established, there were influential voices in Jamaica and Trinidad that argued for the retention of the PC because they felt that English judges were more independent. This argument is not only illogical but it cannot stand up to scholarly scrutiny. Many have argued that the Julian Assange trials have showed that the English judicial system may not be above reproach as many of our CARICOM leaders think.

In fact, it is the opinion of this academic and columnist that the CCJ is far more independent and isolated from political tentacles than in Western democracies that we were brought up to think as colonial subjects were paragons of judicial perfection.

A French court ruled last month that a Tunisian man who lived in France for 40 years should be deported for insulting the French flag. The court denied him the right to appeal. He was deported the next day. Jamaica and Trinidad still believe that the PC is safer than the CCJ. I don’t admire the political views of VS Naipaul but he was spot-on about the infertile minds of Caribbean leaders.