UK Court Rules Julian Assange Can Be Extradited to U.S. on Spying Charges

Julian Assange can be extradited to the United States after a UK appeals court ruled Friday the WikiLeaks founder’s mental health can withstand the American criminal justice system.

AP reports the High Court in London ruled U.S. assurances were enough to guarantee Assange would be treated humanely and directed a lower court judge to send the extradition request to the home secretary for review where the final decision on whether to extradite Assange will be made.

“There is no reason why this court should not accept the assurances as meaning what they say,″ the High Court ruling stated. “There is no basis for assuming that the USA has not given the assurances in good faith.”

Assange’s fiancé, Stella Moris, used social media to label the decision a “grave miscarriage of justice” and said lawyers would file an appeal “at the earliest possible moment.”

Assange is currently being held at London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison. His supporters gathered outside the High Court on Friday, waving banners demanding his release.

A lower court judge earlier this year refused the U.S. request to extradite Assange to face spying charges over WikiLeaks’ publication of secret military documents a decade ago.

District Judge Vanessa Baraitser denied extradition on health grounds, saying Assange was likely to kill himself if held under harsh U.S. prison conditions.

If convicted in the U.S., Assange, 50, faces a possible penalty of up to 175 years in jail, his lawyers have said. However the U.S. government said the sentence was more likely to be between four and six years.

The Australian faces an 18-count indictment from the U.S. government, accusing him of conspiring to hack into U.S. military databases to acquire sensitive secret information relating to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which was then published on the Wikileaks website.

He says the information exposed abuses by the U.S. military.

Assange was jailed for 50 weeks in May 2019 for breaching his bail conditions after going into hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

He sought refuge in the embassy for seven years from 2012 until he was arrested in April 2019, as Breitbart News reported.

At the time he fled to the embassy, he had been facing extradition to Sweden on allegations of sexual assault which he denied. That case was later dropped.

AP contributed to this story

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