Wikileaks’ Founder Julian Assange Can Be Extradicted-British Court

A British High Court ruled on Friday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can be extradited to the United States to face charges of violating the Espionage Act.

The 50-year-old Australian will remain in London’s Belmarsh prison, where he has been held since April 2019 after the Ecuadoran Embassy revoked his political asylum.

Assange’s lawyers will likely file a final appeal to the British Supreme Court, which could either reject to hear the case or take it — if the highest court sees in the appeal “a point of law of general public importance.” That process could take weeks or months.

If the British Supreme Court declines to hear Assange’s final appeal, he could seek a stay of extradition from the European Court of Human Rights.

The High Court ruling on Friday brings Assange one step closing to being turned over to U.S. Marshals for a flight back to Washington, where he would stand trial in federal court in northern Virginia.

In January, a British judge ruled that Assange should not be extradited to the United States, because he would be at high risk of suicide. The U.S. government appealed that decision.

Assange was charged under the Trump administration with violating the Espionage Act, the first time U.S. federal prosecutors have targeted not just the source but the publisher of classified information.

Chelsea Manning, the Army private who shared secret diplomatic and military information with WikiLeaks in 2010, was released from prison under President Obama but spent roughly a year in jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating Assange.

Under President Biden, the Department of Justice has continued to assure British courts that Assange can be put on trial in the United States despite his mental health issues.

If convicted, the U.S. government in October assured the British courts that Assange would not be sent to country’s highest-security prison or automatically placed in solitary confinement. He could seek to serve his sentence in his native Australia.

The U.S. government also argued that a psychiatric evaluation that Assange was at high risk of suicide if extradited was flawed.

Assange’s defense attorneys said the U.S. assurances could not be trusted, especially given a Yahoo News report that members of the Trump administration discussed kidnapping Assange or having him assassinated. Even if they are true, they said, the extradition itself could drive Assange to kill himself.

By the time he was charged in the U.S. under seal in 2018, Assange had already spent six years living in Ecuador’s London embassy out of fear that he would be extradited to Sweden for a sexual assault investigation and ultimately to the United States. The Ecuadorean government expelled him in 2019, and he was promptly arrested by British authorities.

The Department of Justice began investigating Assange in 2010, but under President Obama decided that any prosecution would create a dangerous precedent that could be used to go after news organizations. In their indictment against Assange, prosecutors took pains to distinguish him from traditional journalists, saying that he had encouraged illegal hacking and recording for personal reasons.