A British court is expected to deliver a final decision on whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be extradited to the United States for the mass leak of secret U.S. documents, concluding 13 years of legal battles and detentions.
According to Reuters, two judges at the High Court in London are poised to decide whether the court is convinced by U.S. assurances that Julian Assange would not be subject to the death penalty and could invoke the First Amendment right to free speech if he were to stand trial in the United States for espionage.
Assange, a 52-year-old Australian computer expert, faces indictment in the U.S. on 18 charges related to WikiLeaks' release of hundreds of thousands of classified documents in 2010.
Assange, who hopes to be in court Monday, has been encouraged by the work others have done in the political fight to free him, his wife said. If he loses in court, he still may have another shot at freedom. "Julian is just one decision away from being extradited," his wife Stella Assange was quoted by The Associated Press.
"Julian has been indicted for receiving, possessing and communicating information to the public of evidence of war crimes committed by the U.S. government," his wife, said. "Reporting a crime is never a crime."
The British government authorized Assange's extradition in 2022.
He is confronted with 17 counts of espionage and one charge of computer misuse. His legal team argues that if convicted, he could face a maximum prison sentence of 175 years, although American authorities have suggested that any sentence would probably be much shorter.
Assange and his supporters contend that he acted as a journalist to reveal U.S. military misconduct and is shielded by press freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
U.S. lawyers allege that Assange attempted to hack the Pentagon computer and assert that WikiLeaks' disclosures posed a "serious and immediate risk" to U.S. intelligence sources in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In 2012, Assange sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and was granted political asylum after English courts ordered his extradition to Sweden as part of a rape investigation. Following Ecuador's withdrawal of his asylum status in 2019, British police arrested him for violating bail conditions during his time in the embassy. Although Sweden eventually dropped its sex crimes investigation due to the passage of time, Assange remains incarcerated in London's high-security Belmarsh Prison as the extradition proceedings with the United States persist.
Despite the U.S. criminal case against Assange being unsealed only in 2019, his liberty has been curtailed for over a decade.
