British Court Orders Assange Extradited to US: WikiLeaks Creator Faces Life Imprisonment

On April 20, a British court issued an official extradition order for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States to stand trial for publishing classified files relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the US, he faces a life sentence. with the BBC.

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The decision now rests with Home Secretary Priti Patel, although Assange can still appeal within 14 days of any extradition approval decision.

The ruling brings a legal saga in the UK courts that has been going on since 2019 closer to a close.

But Assange's lawyers promised to present their views to Patel and possibly file further appeals on other points in the case.

“Assange has not yet appealed to the High Court in relation to other important issues he has previously raised,” his lawyers from Birnberg Peirce Solicitors said back in March. “This is a separate appeal process, and it has certainly not begun yet.”

In March, Assange was denied permission to appeal to the UK Supreme Court against his extradition to the US.

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The creator of WikiLeaks has been in a British prison since 2019. In January 2021, a British court refused to extradite him, citing insufficient US guarantees of his safety.

In particular, Assange's lawyers argued that the mental and emotional state of their client, due to the long imprisonment and the events of recent years, is alarming.

They insisted that Assange was suicidal, and the American side allegedly did not prove in any way that it could protect him from this.

US officials then warned British judges that they were setting a dangerous precedent: every person subject to extradition would be able to hide behind a suicidal tendency.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed an appeal, and at a two-day hearing in October 2021, Assange's lawyers received diplomatic assurances that Assange would not be held in isolation in a high-security federal prison and would receive proper care.

As a result, in December 2021, the US Department of Justice won an appeal in the High Court of London against the previous decision to refuse to extradite Assange.

Assange appealed the decision and in January two judges allowed him to appeal to Britain's highest court on "legal issues of public importance." But the court refused permission to appeal.
The charge against Assange came after thousands of classified US government documents, including diplomatic correspondence and military information, were published on the WikiLeaks website he created in 2010 and 2011.

From 2012 to 2019, the founder of WikiLeaks took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. In 2018, Lenin Moreno, then President of Ecuador, granted Assange citizenship of his country, which he later lost due to procedural violations when submitting documents.

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In April 2019, Assange was expelled from the Ecuadorian embassy for violating internal regulations and making political statements that threatened the country's relations with other states. As he was leaving the building, he was arrested by the British police for fleeing justice.

As ForumDaily wrote earlier:

• Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange was given a set of rules accommodation at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, among which is the need to clean the bathroom and take better care of the cat.
• Recall that Assange was arrested in 2019 in London after Ecuador, in whose embassy Assange had been hiding since 2012, decided to deny him asylum.
• CNN reported that it had obtained exclusive access to documents showing that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, during a series of suspicious meetings at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, received some transmissions that could allegedly contain hacked materials related to 2016 US election.
• And Julian Assange's lawyer said that US President Donald Trump offered the founder of Wikileaks a pardon in exchange for denying Russia's role in publishing the correspondence of the US Democratic National Committee ahead of the 2016 presidential elections.
• The Supreme Court in London ruled that Julian Assange may be extradited to the US after Washington provides the UK with guarantees regarding the safety of his detention before and after the US trial.

What WikiLeaks did:

• опубликовал secret CIA documents about total surveillance through smartphones
• wrote an article Bill and Chelsea Clinton nearly drove the former head of the Clinton Foundation to suicide
• unveiled Clinton's speech to bankers
• unveiled the Bush and Obama corruption scheme
• published the correspondence of the CIA director
• published all documents stolen from Sony

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