Declassified UK: foreign ministry 'misled parliament' in Assange case

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British MP and former Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill, accused Foreign Office Minister David Rutley, of “misleading parliament” over his department’s involvement in the secret operation to kidnap Julian Assange.

MacAskill was referring to Operation Pelican, the secret Metropolitan Police-led operation to seize Assange from asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2019, as he asked the minister “whether any people working on Operation Pelican were based within [its] Department’s premises.” 

In response, Rutley told parliament last week: “No Foreign and Commonwealth Office [FDCO] officials were directly assigned to work on Operation Pelican.” However, that contradicts a response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOI) request in July 2021 when the Foreign Office confirmed that “three FCDO officials did some work on Operation Pelican, the most senior of which was Head of Latin America Department.”

In the Ministerial Code, ministers are required to “be as open as possible with parliament” and to “give accurate and truthful information”, which in turn "governs the answers ministers provide to parliamentary questions”.

It was revealed last Tuesday that at least 15 people were appointed by the UK government to the secret operation to seize WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

‘Pelican’ came to light after being revealed in the memoirs published last year by former Foreign Minister Sir Alan Duncan - the key British official in the diplomatic negotiations between the UK and Ecuador to release Assange from the Embassy.

In his memoirs, the Former Minister revealed that he watched live footage of Assange’s arrest from the Operations Room of the Foreign Office alongside personnel carrying out the operation. After the events took place and Assange was imprisoned, Duncan had drinks at his office for the operation team. “I gave them each a signed photo which we took in the Ops Room on the day, with a caption saying ‘Julian Assange’s Special Brexit Team 11th April 2019,’” he wrote. 

Ratting each other out 

David Rutley, Conservative MP for Macclesfield, current foreign minister for the Americas and Caribbean as of October 2022, and currently serving under foreign secretary James Cleverly, is a supporter of PM Rishi Sunak. 

Kenny MacAskill, MP for East Lothian, told Declassified UK: “This new information shows that foreign minister David Rutley misled parliament in answering my recent question. It demonstrates not just the standard obfuscation I have become used to, but actual distortion of the facts about the UK government’s effort to ‘get’ Julian Assange.”

He continued: “The actions of the British government have not simply been to assist the US. They have been active and willing participants in the state-sponsored cruelty meted out to Assange. And then tried to hide it all.”

Home Office minister Kit Malthouse relayed to parliament, despite having eight staff assigned to the Pelican operation, that he has no information surrounding whether other ministries have their hands in it as well. 

Then, in a later response to an FOI request, the Home Office refused to confirm or deny whether it holds information on inter-departmental communication about Pelican. This refusal to rule out whether the Home Office does hold information on the matter raises concerns that Malthouse may also have earlier misled parliament.

According to documents obtained by Declassified UK through an FOI request, officials involved in the operation include, but are not limited to, senior officials such as the Deputy National Security Advisor at the Cabinet Office and the International Director at the Home Office. 

Assange has been unlawfully charged in the US with 17 counts of "espionage" and one count of computer misuse in connection with WikiLeaks' disclosure of tens of thousands of military and diplomatic documents - whereby Assange exposed the US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan - that whistleblower Chelsea Manning had disclosed.

Belmarsh maximum security prison has been where Assange is being kept in the UK for three and a half years so far as he awaits a potential 175-year sentence following the approval in December 2021 of his extradition to the US by the UK High Court.

Four of Britain’s most powerful government ministries continue to refuse to announce if their officials convened with US authorities to discuss the case of Julian Assange - an unjust case that violates human rights at its very core. 

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