Julian Assange to be extradited to the United States

The latest developments

At the center of the London extradition proceedings, which decided the fate of the whistleblower, is the extradition published in May 2019 accusation of the American judicial authorities. The bilateral extradition treaty of 2003 provides for a relatively smooth procedure, which only requires the British court to examine the American allegations for plausibility.

However, it is possible for courts to prohibit extradition on humanitarian grounds. This is what happened in the Assange case. At the beginning of the year, a British court prohibited the extradition of the 50-year-old, taking into account his mental and health condition and the expected prison conditions in the USA. According to an expert report, there is an acute risk of suicide. However, Washington had challenged that decision. This dashed Assange’s hopes that the United States would drop the charges after Joe Biden took office. In the next instance, the complaint therefore went before the Court of Appeal.

The latter has now decided to grant the US application and approve Assange’s expulsion. The previously imposed extradition ban is hereby lifted. The case will probably go to the next instance.

The legal dispute over a possible extradition to the USA has been going on for around two years. The High Court gave the go-ahead. An appeal against this was dismissed by the highest British court, the Supreme Court, as inadmissible. Westminster Magistrates Court issued the formal extradition order in London on Wednesday. This will now go to British Home Secretary Priti Patel for a final decision. However, Assange’s lawyers have four weeks to present further grounds for objection. A further course in court is not excluded.

The US judiciary wants to put Assange on trial for allegations of espionage. He is accused of having stolen and published secret material from American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan together with whistleblower Chelsea Manning. In doing so, he endangered the lives of American informants. The indictment contains 18 counts that could theoretically add up to a maximum prison sentence of 175 years. Basically, Assange is accused of three sets of crimes.

First, he worked in a conspiracy with the then employee of American security services, Chelsea Manning, who stole the secret data, in word and deed. He made himself an accomplice to the data theft. Second, he incited Manning to hack. Third, Assange irresponsibly endangered the lives of scores of people by publishing secret files without covering the identifiers of whistleblowers and US military personnel, dissidents and activists in Iraq, Afghanistan and other repressive countries.

Assange’s supporters, on the other hand, see him as an investigative journalist who exposed war crimes. “If the US succeeds, there will be alarming consequences for press freedom. This case is not just about Assange, it is about the right of all journalists to do their job and the right of the public to be informed,” Reporters Without Borders’ London representative Rebecca Vincent said ahead of the trial to the DPA news agency.

Both sides presented their arguments again at hearings in October. The American lawyers accused the British judiciary of having relied on incorrect expert opinions in their assessment. In addition, the United States pledged not to use “special methods” as feared in the event of arrest and to agree to Assange being transferred to an Australian prison. Specifically, the US guaranteed that Assange would not be held in strict solitary confinement and would receive comprehensive medical care.

Assange’s defenders, on the other hand, are counting on new revelations about alleged attack plans that came to light through media reports a few months ago. Investigative journalists, citing unspecified sources, reported that the CIA was plotting to attack Assange while he was in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. His supporters hope these revelations will make extradition to the US less likely.

Assange’s relatives have been describing his health as poor and worrying for months. At the last hearings, the 50-year-old took part via video link from London’s high-security Belmarsh prison, but at times felt unable to follow what was happening.

The judicial odyssey surrounding Julian Assange began back in 2010. Shortly after the Wikileaks articles were published, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange because two women had accused him of rape and sexual assault. Great Britain, where Assange was at the time, prepared to extradite him, but Assange sued him. He was then initially released on bail and lived under extended house arrest, the legal battle dragged on. Finally, in 2012, the country of Ecuador granted him political asylum. His home country of Australia does not give him the necessary support and he fears being extradited via Sweden to the United States, where he faces the death penalty, Assange justified his asylum application at the time. At that time, however, the United States had not filed any charges against him.

Because the British authorities would not let him travel to Ecuador, Assange subsequently lived in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years, and in 2017 he even received citizenship. At the time, the Ecuadorian government was planning to grant Assange diplomatic status so that he could be safely removed from the embassy. Later, however, tensions arose between the President in Quito and Assange. The Ecuadorian government reversed asylum status in 2019, and Assange was detained by British police for breaching bail conditions. In the same year, his Ecuadorian citizenship was finally revoked.

He was subsequently sentenced to fifty weeks in prison in Britain for violating bail conditions. He has now served this sentence, and the Swedish proceedings against him have also been discontinued. However, because the USA had in the meantime published and significantly tightened their charges against Assange, he was taken into extradition custody. Julian Assange has been in Belmarsh maximum security prison in south London for two and a half years. According to his partner Stella Moris, his physical and mental health is critical.

Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture, accuses the states involved of arbitrariness and psychological torture. Melzer is convinced that should Assange be extradited to the United States, he would be sentenced to life imprisonment under torture-like conditions in a show trial. His spectacular revelations did not make him liable to prosecution, his actions are protected by freedom of the press.

In 2006, Assange founded the Wikileaks disclosure platform together with Chinese dissidents, hackers from the USA and Europe and computer scientists from Australia and South Africa. Wikileaks landed its first internationally acclaimed coup in 2008 with the publication of 200 pages of material about a special group in the Scientology sect known as the «Office of Special Affairs».

From March 2010, Wikileaks published secret military documents and videos related to the international military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, obtained by whistleblower Chelsea Manning. In addition to a lot of trivial things, this also revealed violations of international law by American troops. That remains unforgotten Video from an American attack helicopter that showed the brutal shooting of civilians in Baghdad. From July to October, Wikileaks released around 470,000 classified documents.

The result was protests and diplomatic complications. Above all, the insufficient processing of the material caused criticism. No names were blacked out in the diplomatic cables, so the governments concerned were able to unmask the names of informants in the American embassies. The pressure on Wikileaks grew, and at the request of the American government, Amazon deleted Wikileaks documents from servers rented from Amazon. In the meantime, the address wikileaks.org could no longer be accessed worldwide. The Internet payment service Paypal blocked the platform’s account because Paypal should not be used for illegal activities. When the Wikileaks site became accessible again, it was repeatedly attacked by hackers. In the end, however, Wikileaks managed to secure the data on other servers and thus protect itself from attacks.

With agency material.