The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is one step closer to extradition to the US that he has been trying to avoid for ten years, since the British justice issued on Wednesday the formal order to hand him over to Washington.
(WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange marries his former lawyer in prison)
After having rejected in March “permission to appeal” requested by the Australian’s lawyers, coordinated internationally by former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, the British Supreme Court ruled that the case be transferred to the Minister of the Interior, Priti Patel, who has the last word in all extradition.
(Assange case: fight between David and Goliath that hits press freedom)
That was precisely what Judge Paul Goldspring did on Wednesday during a hearing lasting just seven minutes in Westminster Magistrates’ Court to which
Assange, dressed in a jacket and tie, appeared by videoconference from London’s high-security Belmash prison..
Patel, who has the last word in any extradition, will study the case and Assange’s defense will be able to present their allegations until May 18.
The WikiLeaks founder has been in prison since his spectacular arrest in April 2019 by British police at the Ecuadorian embassy in Londonafter the then President Lenín Moreno withdrew the protection that his predecessor Rafael Correa had granted him.
Violating the conditions of your parole in the UK, the founder of WikiLeaks had taken refuge in the Ecuadorian legation in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape charges that were later dropped.
Denying these charges, he already stated that he feared that everything was a strategy to hand him over to the United States.
Today the English court may sign the request for the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States. The final decision will remain in the hands of the Secretary of Interior Priti Patel. Here Fidel Narváez, former Consul of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London #FreeAssange pic.twitter.com/rClhERlj2n
– Carolina Graterol #FreeAssange (@Moncaro) April 20, 2022
The justice of that country wants judge him for disseminating through WikiLeaks starting in 2010 more than 700,000 secret documents on US diplomatic and military activitiesparticularly in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Among those documents was a video showing civilians, including two journalists from the agency Reuterskilled by gunfire from a US helicopter gunship in Iraq in July 2007.
Prosecuted under anti-espionage legislation, if convicted
Assange can be sentenced to 175 years in prison, in a case that human rights organizations denounce as an attack on press freedom.
The US government, for its part, claims that the Australian is not a journalist but a hacker and that he endangered the lives of numerous informants by publishing complete documents without editing.
Assange’s long judicial saga
At the center of a long judicial saga, Assange was sentenced to a year in jail in London for violating his probation in 2012. before embarking on the battle against his extradition to the United States.
In January 2021, heThe British justice decided in his favor: judge Vanessa Baraitser refused to authorize the extradition on the grounds that the Australian, in fragile physical health and psychological, he was at risk of committing suicide if he was in the US prison system.
But in December, Washington managed to get the London High Court to annul that decision, assuring that he would not be imprisoned in the ADX high-security prison in Florence (Colorado), where members of the jihadist organization Al Qaeda are being held in almost total isolation. . And they guaranteed that he would receive the necessary clinical and psychological care, mentioning the possibility of allowing him to serve his sentence in a prison in his native Australia.
For its defenders, led by Stella Moris, the South African lawyer with whom he secretly had two children during his years at the Ecuadorian embassy and whom he married in Belmash last month, these guarantees are not credible.
Stressing that “Julian’s fate is now in the hands of the interior minister,” Moris insisted in March that “this is a political case and she can put an end to it.”
“It takes political courage, but this is what it takes to preserve an open society that protects publishers from foreign persecution,” he said.
AFP
In other news
What was moving on the macabre Russian website that Germany dismantledPitbull terrier attacked a two-year-old boy in the United Kingdom
#Julian #Assange #step #closer #extradited #United #States