Washington wants to try the founder of the website of leaks WikiLeaks for the publication, as of 2010, of some 700,000 secret diplomatic and military documents, mainly related to the US-led wars in Afghanistan e Iraq.
On December 10, the US government won a major victory when a London appeals court overturned a previous decision not to hand him over.
Immediately the former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon, international coordinator for the defense of Assange, announced that they would use “all national and international resources to defend someone who has not committed any crime and has heroically and courageously resisted persecution for more than eleven years for defending freedom of expression and access at the information”.
En the United Kingdom to appeal to the Supreme Court the justice must first authorize it.
In the first instance, the London judge Vanessa Baraitser had prevented the extradition in January 2021, considering that Assange, of fragile mental health, could commit suicide if he was handed over to the United States judicial system.
But in October, Washington lawyers appealed that decision. They guaranteed that the 50-year-old Australian would not be held in punitive isolation in a maximum-security federal prison and that he would receive adequate medical treatment.
Deeming these safeguards sufficient, the appeals court decided last month that, without further review, the case was sent to the Ministry of the Interior, which has the final say on any extradition.
Assange’s case became a cause for the defenders of the freedom of expression, for whom WikiLeaks has the same rights as other media to publish secret material, if it is in the public interest.
But the US government, which has indicted him on 18 counts including espionage, claims that Assange is not a journalist but a hacker and the disclosure of unredacted documents endangered the lives of his informants.
If extradited, he could be sentenced to a maximum of 175 years, although the exact sentence is difficult to calculate.
Leaving court in December, his fiancée, South African lawyer Stella Moris, denounced the “cynicism” of “having one of the leading journalists of the last 50 years in a British jail accused of publishing the truth about war crimes, about the CIA assassinations.
And the NGO for the defense of human rights International Amnesty questioned the US guarantees, calling them “inherently unreliable”. For its part, Reporters Without Borders “condemned” a decision with “dangerous implications for the future of press freedom in the world.”
The Australian has been held in the Belmarsh high security prison, near London, since in April 2019 he was arrested by surprise inside the Ecuadorian embassy after the then president Lenin Moreno withdraw the asylum granted by his predecessor Rafael Correa.
First it was in compliance with a British sentence for having breached the conditions of his parole by taking refuge in the legation to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where he faced sexual assault charges since dropped. The Australian claimed to fear being sent from there to the United States.
Later, he was kept in preventive detention while his extradition is decided, since the judge considered that he could try to escape again if he was released.
Source From: Ambito
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