2024-02-15 13:56:00
London, Feb 15 (EFE).- Stella Assange warned this Thursday about the health of her husband, Julian Assange, before next week he faces the last leg of his extradition process to the United States, which is demanding him for 18 crimes of espionage and computer intrusion after the revelations on its WikiLeaks portal.
“If Julian is extradited to the United States, he will die,” the 40-year-old lawyer told EFE at the end of a press conference in London with the current director of WikiLeaks, Kristinn Hrafnsson, and the representative of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Rebecca. Vincent.
“This is Julian’s final appeal. If he loses this round, it will be the end of the road in the UK courts. There is no possibility of appeal. Of course, he will try to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), but The British Government will try to extradite him,” he said.
The mother of her two youngest children explained that her husband’s physical and mental health “has deteriorated” even since he suffered a small stroke in October 2021 and suffers the consequences of spending 22 hours a day in a 3×2 meter glass cell. in London’s Belmarsh prison.
Stella Assange recalled that, as was already considered proven during the process, the 52-year-old Australian presents a risk of suicide and assured that he would not survive the extreme conditions of a high-security American prison.
In this sense, he told EFE that the ‘diplomatic guarantees’ offered by Washington in previous trials that it will ensure his health are false.
“These supposed guarantees are conditional, they do not prevent the United States from doing anything (…). The conditions of his confinement would be decided by the CIA, the same agency that has conspired to assassinate him,” he declared.
“There is no doubt that he will be buried in a hole so far away and deep that I don’t think I will ever see him again,” lamented the Swedish-Spanish lawyer.
After hearing the parties on February 20 and 21, the High Court of London will decide whether to allow Assange to appeal his case again in this country, which would begin a new appeal trial, or if he should instead proceed to hand him over to the United States. United States authorized in 2022 by the then British Home Secretary, Priti Patel.
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Although the ruling could take weeks, the 52-year-old journalist’s legal team fears that the two Superior Court judges will give the green light to the extradition on Tuesday, in which case they would request an urgent ‘order 39’ from the ECtHR to stop it, before to request that the case be reviewed by the European court.
Hrafnsson and Vincent hoped that the talks between the US and Australian governments to drop the charges against Assange, which they consider politically motivated, will bear fruit.
Assange has been in preventive detention in Belmarsh since he was detained at the request of the US following his expulsion on April 11, 2019 from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, which withdrew his asylum.
The journalist had taken refuge there in 2012, after his initial arrest in the British capital in 2010 at the request of Sweden, for a case now archived.
The United States is pursuing him for classified information – provided by his US Army contact Chelsea Manning, now free, published in 2010 and 2011 by WikiLeaks – which exposed US human rights violations in the Iraq and Iraq wars. Afghanistan.
(c) EFE Agency
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