Julian Assange’s partner said a decision to extradite the co-founder of WikiLeaks to the US would be ‘politically and legally disastrous for the UK’ on the eve of the judge’s ruling.
Assange, 49, is facing a charge of 18 counts, alleging a conspiracy to hack computers and a conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information in a case that critics have declared a dangerous attack on press freedom.
District Judge Vanessa Baraitser will decide on Monday at the Old Bailey whether he should be extradited to face the charges in the US, where his lawyers say he should face up to 175 years in prison if convicted. The U.S. government says the sentence is likely to last between four and six years.
Stella Moris, who has two children at Assange, said before Baraitzer’s verdict that a decision to allow extradition was not only an “unthinkable travesty” for her partner, but that it would damage the cherished British freedoms.
Timeline
Julian Assange extradition battle
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WikiLeaks releases about 470,000 classified military documents on US diplomacy and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It later released a further portion of more than 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables.
A Swedish prosecutor issues a European arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of sexual assault involving two Swedish women. Assange denies the claims.
A British judge ruled that Assange could be extradited to Sweden. Assange fears that Sweden will hand him over to US authorities who could prosecute him.
Assange is being questioned in a two-day interview about the allegations by the Swedish authorities at the Ecuadorian embassy.
Britain refuses Ecuador’s request to grant Assange diplomatic status, enabling him to leave the embassy without being arrested.
Police are arresting Assange on behalf of the U.S. at the embassy after his asylum was withdrawn. He is charged by the U.S. with “a federal charge of conspiracy to commit computer hacking because he agreed to break a password for a classified U.S. government computer.”
Assange’s extradition trial begins at Woolwich Crown Court in south – east London. After a week of arguments, the extradition case should be postponed until May. Further delays are caused by the outbreak of the coronavirus.
A trial scheduled for four weeks begins in Old Bailey, with the U.S. government expected to state their case that Assange tried to recruit hackers to find classified government information. If the courts approve extradition, the British government will still have the final say.
“It would rewrite the rules of what is permissible to publish here,” Moris wrote in the Mail on Sunday. ‘It will make overnight a free and open debate on abuse by our own government and by many foreign governments.
‘In fact, the outside world can simply submit an extradition request stating that British journalists, or Facebook users in this regard, have violated their censorship laws. The freedom of the press that we have in Britain is meaningless if it can be criminalized and suppressed by regimes in Russia or Ankara or by prosecutors in Alexandria, Virginia. ”
The case against Assange relates to WikiLeaks’ publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents on the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as diplomatic cables, in 2010 and 2011.
Prosecutors say Assange helped U.S. defense analyst Chelsea Manning violate the espionage law, was complicit in hacking by others and published classified information that endangered U.S. informants.
Assange denies plotting with Manning to crack an encrypted password on U.S. Department of Defense computers and says there is no evidence that anyone’s security was compromised.
His lawyers claim that the prosecution is politically motivated and that he is being prosecuted because WikiLeaks published US government documents that revealed evidence of war crimes and human rights violations.
Kristinn Hrafnsson, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, said: ‘The mere fact that this case has come to court, let alone for so long, is a historic, large-scale attack on freedom of speech.
“The U.S. government needs to listen to the support of the mainstream media outlets, NGOs around the world, such as Amnesty and Reporters Without Borders and the United Nations who are all calling for these charges to be dropped.”
Assange has been detained at Belmarsh Prison with high security since police removed him from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been hiding for seven years, and arrested him for violating his bail conditions.
UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Prof Nils Melzer, who visited him in Belmarsh, said Assange was showing all the symptoms associated with prolonged exposure to psychological torture and should not be extradited. The court heard he was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, and psychiatrists for the defense said he was suffering from severe depression and had a high risk of suicide.