The founder of Wikileaks awaits an appeal against the US lawsuit for alleged crimes that could sentence him to 175 years
Thousands of people have formed this Saturday a human chain around the perimeter of the British Parliament, demanding the release of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, who has been in a maximum security prison in London for almost four years, waiting for the US extradition request to be resolved.
Assange’s wife, Estella Moris, a distinguished human rights lawyer, has stated that “Julian faces a possible sentence of 175 years in the United States for his work as a journalist.” She explained it in these words: “For receiving information from a source and publishing it, and it was in the public interest. It was about war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it revealed the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, which had not been acknowledged before.”
Alongside the event in London, protesters and personalities who reject imprisonment and possible extradition gathered in Melbourne and Washington. Australia’s new Prime Minister, Labor Anthony Albanese, has refused to express his support for the demands of the Australian journalist’s defenders. In the US capital they met in front of the Ministry of Justice.
The Joe Biden Administration has not followed the policy of Barack Obama, who withdrew the Assange petition and pardoned his source, Chelsea Manning, who transmitted to Wikileaks documents that he obtained from the Defense Ministry databases when he worked as an expert on Intelligence for the Army. The current Administration has made possible the decision of the British judges and the Government of Boris Johnson to extradite him.
Hundreds of Britons protest Assange’s extradition. /
The British judge who saw the first sentence rejected the extradition, in January 2021, due to the risk that Assange would take his own life if he was extradited and imprisoned in a special solitary confinement. That “oppressive” nature of the lawsuit was endorsed by doctors and psychiatrists who testified to the mental health problems suffered by the detainee after years of isolation and jail.
The Australian took refuge in 2012 at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, when the Supreme Court was going to reject his appeal against the decision to extradite him to Sweden, to respond to the investigation of two complaints of rape by supporters of the Wikileaks boss. They would have consented to sexual intercourse on the condition that he use a condom, which the accused took off.
back to the start
Because this act is also a crime of rape under the law of England and Wales, the London courts that heard the case decided in favor of sending it to Sweden, within the legal framework of the European Arrest Warrant. Assange spent seven years in the Ecuadorian diplomatic compound, until a change of government in Quito ended the asylum, allowing the British Police, in 2019, to enter to arrest him. He was incarcerated at Belmarsh Prison, where he still remains.
The US Ministry of Justice then activated his extradition request, alleging fifteen crimes of espionage and another of illegal manipulation of computers. The espionage ones are based on the publication of confidential documents and the other on the accusation that Assange would have advised Manning to enter the databases without leaving fingerprints to identify him.
After the rejection of the extradition in the first stay, Washington resorted to the Court of Appeal, to which he assured that no special measures of imprisonment would be applied to him, if he is sent. The court accepted the guarantee and the extradition, and gave permission to the persecuted lawyers to appeal to the Supreme Court. The highest court did not see in the appeal a legal argument worth hearing.
After that negative sentence, the case returned to the first instance, which certified the extradition and transferred the decision to the then Minister of the Interior, Priti Patel, who gave the go-ahead. Assange’s defense has filed an appeal to the Court of Appeal against Patel’s decision and the United States’ lawsuit, in which it seeks the annulment of the other considerations of the judge of first instance that, except for ‘oppression’, gave for Good extradition. In case of rejection of the appeal, he will ask to be heard by the European Court of Human Rights.
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