LONDON (AP) – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will find out on Monday whether he can be extradited from the UK to the United States to face espionage charges for publishing secret US military documents.
District Judge Vanessa Baraitser is due to deliver her decision to Old Bailey Court in London at 10am. If she accepts the request, Britain’s Home Secretary, Priti Patel, would make the final decision.
He is expected to appeal to any losing party, which could lead to more legal disputes for years.
However, there is a possibility that external forces may come into play that could instantly end the ten-year saga.
Stella Moris, Assange’s partner and the mother of her two children, has appealed to US President Donald Trump via Twitter to grant Assange a pardon before leaving office on January 20. .
And even if Trump doesn’t, there is speculation that his successor, Joe Biden, could take a more lenient approach to Assange’s extradition process.
U.S. prosecutors charged the 49-year-old Assange with 17 counts of espionage and one count of misuse of computers that carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison.
Lawyers acting on behalf of the U.S. government said in their final arguments after the four-week hearing in the fall that Assange’s defense team had raised issues that were neither relevant nor admissible.
“Consistently, the defense asks this court to make conclusions or act on the statement that the United States of America is guilty of torture, war crimes, murder, breaches of diplomatic and international law, and that the United States of America America is “a lawless state,” they said. “Not only are these communications not justifiable in these proceedings, but they should never have been made.”
Assange’s defense team argued that it is entitled to First Amendment protections for the publication of leaked documents exposing U.S. military violations in Iraq and Afghanistan and that the extradition request of the United States had a political motivation.
In its written closing arguments, Assange’s legal team accused the United States of “extraordinary, unprecedented and politicized” prosecution that constitutes “a flagrant denial of its right to freedom of expression and that represents a fundamental threat to press freedom around the world. ” ”
Defense attorneys also said Assange suffered from various mental health problems, including suicidal tendencies, which could be exacerbated if he is in inhospitable prisons in the U.S.
They said his mental health deteriorated while he had been taking asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London for years and was diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. Assange jumped bail in 2012 when he applied for asylum at the embassy, where he remained seven years before being evicted and arrested. He has been detained in Belmarsh Prison in London since April 2019.
His legal team argued that Assange, if extradited, would likely have isolation that would put him at high risk of suicide. They said that if he was later convicted, he would probably be sent to the famous ADX Supermax prison in Colorado, where Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and Mexican drug trafficker Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman also live.
U.S. government attorneys argued that Assange’s mental state “is clearly not so serious as to prevent extradition.”
Assange has attracted the support of renowned figures, including dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and actress Pamela Anderson.
Daniel Ellsberg, the famous American whistleblower, also supported the audience’s statement that they had “very comparable political views.”
The 89-year-old, widely credited for helping end the Vietnam War through the leaking Pentagon documents in 1971, said the American public “urgently needed to know what was routinely done in his name was no other way to learn it than through unauthorized disclosure ”.
There are clear echoes between Assange and Ellsberg, who leaked more than 7,000 pages of classified documents to the press, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. Ellsberg was subsequently tried on 12 charges related to violations of the Espionage Act, which were punishable by up to 115 years in prison. The charges were dismissed in 1973 due to the government’s misconduct against him.
Assange and his legal team will wait for U.S. developments to end their ordeal if the judge grants the U.S. extradition request.