The founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange he is trying as of today to secure from the British justice the right to present his last appeal against his extradition to the USA, which wants to try him for the publication of a huge amount of classified and secret diplomatic and military documents.
As the hearing approached, his supporters once again warned against the risk to the life of the Australian, 52, who has remained imprisoned for the past five years in a maximum security prison in Britain, a case that has become a symbol of threats to freedom of the press. .
Today and tomorrow, British justice is expected to review the refusal to allow Julian Assange to proceed with an appeal against his extradition to the US.
The British government had in principle accepted the extradition request in June 2022.
“If he loses, he no longer has any possibility to appeal” in the United Kingdom, his wife Stella Assange, with whom they had two children while he was locked up in the Ecuadorian embassy in the British capital, told the BBC yesterday.
“We hope that we will have time to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)” so that it intervenes in time, he emphasized, as broadcast by international agencies and relayed by the Athens News Agency.
If extradited, “he will die,” she warned last week.
In January 2021, British justice initially ruled in favor of the WikiLeaks founder. Citing the Australian's risk of suicide, Judge Vanessa Barrecher refused to give the go-ahead for extradition. But this decision was later annulled.
“Alcatraz of the Rockies”
In an attempt to reassure him about his treatment, the US had assured him that he would not be incarcerated at the ADX maximum security prison in Florence (Colorado), nicknamed the “Alcatraz of the Rockies”, and that he would receive clinical and psychiatric care. They had also mentioned the possibility of him serving his sentence in Australia.
These guarantees convinced the British judiciary, but not Julian Assange's supporters, who consider his prosecution political.
If extradited to the US, tried and convicted, he faces up to 175 years in prison for leaking more than 700,000 classified documents since 2010 about US military and diplomatic activities, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The material he disclosed included video showing civilians, including two journalists and a Reuters photojournalist, being killed by attack helicopter fire in Iraq in July 2007.
These documents were obtained thanks to Chelsea Manning, a former US military analyst. After being sentenced in August 2013 to serve 35 years in prison by a military court, she was finally released after seven years, by order of former President Barack Obama.
In recent days, demonstrations of support for Julian Assange have multiplied. Many journalistic organizations have sided with the Australian.
“Enough”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last week criticized US authorities' prosecution of its founder WikiLeaksplacing himself at the meeting in which the Australian Parliament passed a resolution calling for it to be terminated.
“This case cannot go on indefinitely,” Mr Albanese told the semi-circle, adding that most Australians agreed, regardless of political affiliation, that this story had gone on “enough”.
The prime minister added that he had raised the issue of Mr Assange's case “at the highest level” in Britain and the US.
After being arrested by British police in April 2019 after seven years of being locked up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden over sexual assault charges that have since been dropped, he has been held in recent years in Belmars maximum security prison, south-east London.
Earlier this month, Alice Jill Edwards, the UN special rapporteur on torture, called on the British government to end the extradition process: “Julian Assange suffers from chronic depression and relapses. It has been assessed that there is a risk of suicide,” he explained.
In her view, “the risk of being placed in solitary confinement for an extended period of time despite his precarious state of mental health and the imposition of a potentially disproportionate sentence raise questions as to whether Mr Assange's extradition to the US would be compatible with international obligations of the United Kingdom on human rights'.
Source: News Beast
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