WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange allowed to fight extradition to U.S.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can appeal his extradition to the United States to stand trial for espionage charges, Britain’s High Court ruled Monday.

The High Court in London gave Assange permission to appeal to the U.K. Supreme Court, which has to agree to accept the case before it can move forward.

“Make no mistake, we won today in court,” Assange’s fiancée, Stella Moris, declared outside the courthouse, noting he remains in custody at Belmarsh Prison in London.

“We will fight this until Julian is free,” she added.

The WikiLeaks founder, 50, has been charged under the Espionage Act for publishing thousands of classified military and diplomatic cables in 2010, stolen by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, but wasn’t arrested until April 2019, when he left the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, where he’d been hiding for seven years.

A magistrates’ court ruled in January 2021 that Assange could not be extradited to the U.S., saying that would be “oppressive” to his mental health and that he was “either severely or moderately clinically depressed” and posed a suicide risk. The decision was overturned in December by two senior judges.

Assange was arrested in 2019 for skipping bail seven years earlier and holing up in the Ecuadoran Embassy to avoid allegations of rape and sexual assault in Sweden.

Swedish prosecutors dropped the molestation investigation in 2015 and the rape investigation in 2019, saying too much time had passed.

Though U.S. prosecutors say Assange unlawfully helped Manning steal classified diplomatic cables and military files that WikiLeaks later published, putting lives at risk, Assange’s lawyers argue he was acting as a journalist and is protected by the First Amendment. They say the documents exposed U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“He should not face criminal prosecution and decades in prison for publishing truthful information of great public importance, said Barry Pollack, his lawyer in the United States.

Assange faces up to 175 years in prison if convicted in the U.S.