A British High Court has granted Julian Assange limited leave to appeal his extradition to the United States from the United Kingdom.
The United States has until April 16 to provide “assurances” that Assange “is permitted to rely on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution (which protects free speech), that he is not prejudiced at trial (including sentence) by reason of his nationality, that he is afforded the same First Amendment protections as a United States citizen and that the death penalty is not imposed” or else the court will grant Assange the right to a full appeal hearing regarding his extradition.
The United States has sought to extradite Assange since 2019, having accused him of violating the Espionage Act by publishing in 2010 tens of thousands of classified documents he obtained from Chelsea Manning, a former intelligence analyst.
The Heritage Foundation has pointed out:
A formal government review of Assange’s actions and of their consequences found the following:
Multiple lives were lost and others were put at risk.
U.S. diplomatic relations were severely harmed.
Foreign militaries changed their tactics and procedures—making them more difficult to predict and counter.
Key intelligence sources and methods were lost or disrupted.
Tens of millions of taxpayer funds were wasted responding to or mitigating the threat posed by these illegal disclosures.
“Assange, a self-proclaimed ‘famous teenage hacker in Australia,’ has a long history of actively encouraging and recruiting individuals to hack into non-public systems to obtain sensitive classified information, often telling those individuals how to exploit system vulnerabilities and providing those individuals with a list of targets,” the Heritage Foundation added.
In late 2010, Assange moved from Great Britain to Sweden, where the police issued an international arrest warrant for him after accusations of sexual assault. In June 2012, the Ecuadorean Embassy in London offered him asylum, which lasted until 2019, at which point the United States indicted him for violating the Espionage Act.
Assange was then arrested; in 2021, a British judge denied the extradition order, a decision that was reversed by the British High Court. In 2022, British Home Secretary Priti Patel approved the extradition request.
In the decision released Tuesday, the court noted, “Turning however to the 2003 Act, the starting point is that the language of section 81(a) is clear. It precludes extradition where extradition is for the purpose of prosecuting the requested person on account of their political opinions. It says nothing, however, about preventing extradition for a political offence. Although there may be a degree of overlap, the two are separate concepts.”
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Although Assange’s lawyers say he could be sentenced to 175 years in prison in America, the U.S. government’s attorneys say it is more likely he would be sentenced to four to six years in prison.