British judge to rule on US bid to extradite Assange
LONDON: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will learn today whether a British judge has approved his extradition to the United States to face charges including espionage over the release of secret US military documents.
US authorities accuse Australianborn Assange (49) of 18 counts of conspiring to hack government computers and of breaching a secrecy law by releasing vast troves of confidential military records and diplomatic cables more than a decade ago.
If extradited and then found guilty of espionage, Assange could go to prison for 30 to 40 years, his lawyers say.
Whoever loses today’s ruling is likely to appeal to the High
Court and the case could go the United Kingdom's Supreme Court, further delaying the final outcome.
US prosecutors and Western security officials see Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, as a reckless and dangerous enemy of the state whose actions put at risk the lives of agents whose names were in the material.
Supporters regard him as an antiestablishment hero who has been victimised because he exposed US wrongdoing in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and say his prosecution is an assault on journalism and free speech.
Assange’s legal team said in its closing written submission to Judge Vanessa Baraitser that the prosecution had been politically motivated.
The legal team representing the US has challenged that assertion.
WikiLeaks published a US military video in 2010 showing a 2007 attack by Apache helicopters in Baghdad that killed a dozen people, including two Reuters news staff. It then released thousands of secret classified files and diplomatic cables.
The legal saga began soon afterwards when Sweden sought Assange’s extradition from Britain over allegations of sex crimes. When he lost that case in 2012, Assange fled to the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he spent seven years.
When he was finally dragged out in April 2019, he was jailed for breaching British bail conditions although the Swedish case against him had been dropped. Last June, the US Justice Department formally asked Britain to extradite him.
Assange’s legal team say the charges are politically motivated, his mental health is at risk and conditions in US prisons breach Britain’s human rights laws.
The US legal team has said many of Assange’s defence arguments are issues that should be addressed in a trial and have no bearing on extradition.
There is also a possibility that Joe Biden might reverse the decision to prosecute Assange after Biden succeeds Trump as president later this month. — Reuters