Alfred de Zayas, former UN Rapporteur, has described the actions of the British authorities in pursuit of Assange as "… contrary to the rule of law and contrary to the spirit of the law."  What we see on the surface is an illusion of British justice, masking a political agenda behind it.

Britain's notorious Belmarsh Prison is now being presented as beacon of good governance, indicative of a fair and just society which equitable but firm with perpetrators. After carefully reviewing the case of Julian Assange though, there can be little doubt that placing the award-winning journalist in such a facility is nothing but the latest vehicle for his rendition to the US.

So far, Belmarsh has been fulfilling that state agenda.

Belmarsh as the state's next weapon of choice

Judge Deborah Taylor sent Assange to category A Belmarsh prison for a bail-skipping offense, even though he'd demonstrated that he had good reason to skip bail.

It is difficult not to conclude that the category A assignment was done so that he would be weak and vulnerable. In essence, Assange was sent to Belmarsh for 50 weeks for failing to turn up at a police station. There was no ongoing court case; he had no prior offenses; there were no charges; the Swedish investigation had been dropped. So skipping police bail was all the British government had.

It should also be pointed out that Judge Taylor made a series of mistakes during the sentencing on 1st May, referring to rape charges in Sweden, which Assange corrected and which she then acknowledged were wrong. This indicates that Judge Taylor went into court at least uninformed, set in her mind that Assange had somewhere, somehow been charged with rape. This would seem to explain some of the reasoning behind Judge Taylor's cruel sentencing, described by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention as 'disproportionate' but also as furthering the arbitrary deprivation of Assange's liberty.  What's more, it has been pointed out how several thousand people in the UK skip bail each year and are in now way subject to such harsh punishment.

Clearly, Judge Taylor had used narratives provided by the state in order to send Assange to a category A penitentiary, even though these narratives have been thoroughly debunked. One of the false story lines promulgated by the British state and its mainstream media adjuncts, was that Swedish authorities had dropped its sex allegations case against Assange because it 'could not progress with it' while he was holed-up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.  This piece of disinformation was false, shown by the fact that Swedish authorities had already carried out no less than 44 video link or in-person interviews with persons of interest and thus were more than capable of interviewing Assange too.

As for the case itself, the question has now become: what case? Opened then shut, then opened again, then shut, then opened, and yet – Sweden's office of Public Prosecutions still said at the time that, 'an interview is not on the cards'.