LONDON: London’s High Court has scheduled two days of hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday to decide whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may appeal a United States request for extradition to stand trial on espionage charges.
Those charges carry maximum penalties of 175 years, but the real danger, says Assange’s wife Stella, is that he may suffer an inadvertent death penalty instead.“His health is in decline, physically and mentally,” Stella Assange recently told reporters. “His life is at risk every single day he stays in prison, and if he’s extradited, he will die.”
If Wednesday’s decision goes against Assange, his legal team plans to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights – though a favourable ruling there may not come in time to stop an extradition. Assange will not attend court due to illness, his lawyers said on Tuesday. A British judge agreed in January 2021, ruling he should not be extradited to the US because he was likely to commit suicide in near total isolation.
“I find that the mental condition of Mr. Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America,” judge Vanessa Baraitser said.
But the US has continued to press for his extradition.
The 17 charges of espionage from a district court in East Virginia stem from Assange’s publication in 2010 of hundreds of thousands of pages of classified US military documents on his website, WikiLeaks.
US prosecutors say Assange conspired with US intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack the Pentagon’s servers to retrieve the documents. –Agencies
