British court allowed Assange's extradition to the United States: he faces 175 years in prison

The Supreme Court in London ruled that Julian Assange could be extradited to the United States after Washington provides the UK with guarantees regarding the safety of his pre-trial and post-trial detention in the United States. Writes about it with the BBC.

Photo: Shutterstock

“The court allows Assange to appeal this decision,” said Timothy Holroyd, one of the judges who ruled in favor of the United States.

Julian Assange's fiancé Stella Maurice assured that their lawyers will do this as soon as possible.

If Assange does not find a way to delay extradition from the UK, he could be in the US in a few weeks.

50-year-old Julian Assange has been accused in the United States since 2012 of conspiracy to obtain and disclose information constituting state secrets, after thousands of classified documents of the US government were published on the WikiLeaks website, including diplomatic correspondence and military information (full the list of charges below).

Since 2019, Assange has been in a British prison, he was arrested for violating the conditions of release from custody on bail.

From 2012 to 2019, the founder of WikiLeaks lived at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He was protected there while trying to avoid extradition to Sweden, where charges of sexual assault were brought against him. He always denied these accusations, and as a result, the Swedish case against him was closed.

Back in January 2021, a London court refused to extradite Assange to the United States, after which the American authorities appealed against this ruling in the High Court.

On the subject: Monument to Snowden, Assange and Manning opened in Berlin

Then Assange's lawyers said that their client was in a state that could lead to the desire to commit suicide, and the US authorities did not provide any guarantees that the conditions in which Assange would be held could protect him from this.

The court agreed with Assange's lawyers.

The representative of the American side, James Lewis, said that the judge succumbed to the manipulations of Assange, who pity the court with threats of suicide, and such a precedent can ultimately be used by anyone who wants to avoid extradition.

James Lewis, among other things, recalled that at the hearings in October, he provided the court with guarantees of the safe detention of Julian Assange in prison.

These included:

• The US is committed to not placing Assange in solitary confinement before or after his trial - unless he commits any further offenses;
• Assange will be able to serve his sentence in Australia. He will be able to ask for a transfer to an Australian prison, and the US will not object to that;
• the administration of the prison where Assange will sit will provide him with any treatment recommended by the doctors;
• Assange will not be held in the ADX Florence Super Maximum Security Prison, where prisoners are kept in complete isolation from each other.

One of Assange's lawyers, Edward Fitzgerald, said that these guarantees were presented too late to be properly verified, so the judge made the absolutely correct decision.

“It is perfectly reasonable to consider extraditing a mentally ill person impossible because his extradition could result in his death,” Fitzgerald said at the hearing, noting that the court should be able to use its power to protect people from extradition to a foreign country over which it has no control. what they will do with them.

However, the judges still decided that the United States would be able to ensure the safety of Assange and prevent him from committing suicide.

If convicted in the United States, Julian Assange will have a cumulative prison sentence of nearly 175 years.

What Assange is accused of

It all began back in 2012, when thousands of secret US government documents, including diplomatic correspondence and military information, appeared on the WikiLeaks website.

The United States brought 17 charges against Assange, who was in Britain at that time, for disclosing state secrets and one for illegal hacking of computer networks.

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The prosecutor then said that by these actions Assange endangered the lives of American intelligence agents in a number of countries, primarily the Middle East.

In 2019 year US Department of Justice expands indictment against Assange... A new evidence base has appeared in the document. In particular, the American authorities spoke about several conferences at which Assange allegedly tried to recruit hackers who could help him get classified information.

In addition, Assange is accused of contacting hacker groups and providing them with a list of targets for hacking. The list included the CIA and the NSA.

As ForumDaily wrote earlier:

• Assange was arrested in 2019 in London after Ecuador, in whose embassy Assange had been hiding since 2012, decided to deny him asylum.
• Julian Assange's lawyer stated 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.

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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