U.S. gets court boost in fight over Assange’s extradition from U.K.
The U.S. won a bid to expand the scope of its appeal against a London court ruling that Julian Assange can’t be extradited due to his mental health.
The decision at a hearing Wednesday comes after the U.S. last month was granted only limited permission to appeal the ruling and wasn’t allowed to challenge a judge’s assessment of Mr. Assange’s risk of suicide.
“It is arguable that more detailed and critical consideration should have been given” when considering the impartiality of a expert witness’s evidence “which contained misleading information” and “significant omissions,” said Timothy Holroyde, the judge in Wednesday’s ruling.
He cited a written statement by one of Mr. Assange’s expert witnesses, which failed to disclose that the WikiLeaks founder’ had a partner and two children when assessing the state of his mental health.
On Wednesday, the 50year-old Australian, wearing a dark face mask, listened in by video link from London’s high- security Belmarsh prison, where he has been held since 2019.
The dispute comes after a U.K. judge blocked Mr. Assange’s extradition in January, citing the risk of suicide in a U.S. jail. The Australian national remains in a British high-security prison as he’s considered a flight risk. Mr. Assange has spent the last decade either in a U. K. prison or in Ecuador’s embassy in London. The U.S. charged him in 2019 with espionage for his role in releasing hundreds of thousands of pages of classified documents via WikiLeaks, with the help of U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.
In their appeal, lawyers for the U.S. had argued that the evidence wasn’t based on Mr. Assange’s current mental state, but rather hinged on predictions of how it may evolve. It was also largely reliant on his own self-reporting of his health, they said.
“There was an obvious need for caution and scrutiny when it came to Assange’s self reports,” said Clair Dobbin, a lawyer for the U.S. “That need substantially increased in this case because of the extraordinary lengths Assange had already gone to” in order to “avoid extradition to U.S.”
“The U.S. government’s handling of the case exposes the underlying nature of the prosecution against Julian: subverting the rules so that Julian’s ability to defend himself is obstructed and undermined while he remains in prison for years and years, unconvicted, and held on spurious charges,” Mr. Assange’s partner Stella Moris said in a statement before the ruling.
“For every day that this colossal injustice is allowed to continue, Julian’s situation grows increasingly desperate,” said Ms. Moris, who has two young children with Mr. Assange. “Julian has been denied the love and affection of his family for so long. Julian and the kids will never get this time back. This shouldn’t be happening,” she added.
The U.K.’s Crown Prosecution Service declined to comment.
Last month, the U.S. was allowed to challenge whether the judge applied the law correctly, if she gave the U.S. sufficient advance notice of her decision and whether assurances given by the government mitigate Mr. Assange’s risk of suicide.
Since the ruling, the U.S. assured Britain that Mr. Assange won’t be held in a socalled supermax jail if extradited and would be allowed to serve prison time in Australia. It also promised to provide Mr. Assange with psychological treatment as recommended by a clinician.
A hearing on the substance of the appeal will take place in October.
Mr. Assange was arrested in London in 2010 at the request of Sweden, which wanted to question him about allegations of rape and sexual assault made by two women. In 2012, Mr. Assange jumped bail and sought refuge inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he remained holed up for the next seven years.
Ecuador withdrew the asylum it had granted him in 2019 and he was then immediately arrested for breaching bail. Sweden dropped the sex crimes investigations in November 2019 because so much time had elapsed.
Ms. Dobbin, presenting the U.S. government, said Wednesday that the need to scrutinize January’s ruling was “substantially increased” given the “extraordinary lengths” Mr. Assange had already gone to in order to avoid extradition.