WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been fighting his extradition to the USA for years and the legal process has almost been exhausted. What might be his final hearing began yesterday in London. The Supreme Court should decide whether Julian Assange has a right to appeal. “Now it’s a matter of life or death,” warns his wife Stella. She fears that if the 52-year-old is extradited from Great Britain to the USA, he will not be able to survive his imprisonment. He faces up to 175 years in prison there. The hearing is scheduled for two days. A verdict is expected at the end of the week.
A handful of Assange’s supporters demonstrated in front of the London court early in the morning. They waved placards reading “Freedom for Julian Assange” and chanted: “There is only one decision: no extradition.”
Last hope EU court
However, the immediate dismissal of Julian Assange is not even up for negotiation this time. At best, the native Australian can ensure that he is allowed to appeal once more once morest the extradition to the USA that has already been decided by the British Home Office. If he is refused, he faces deportation within 28 days. Then only an injunction from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) can protect him from being handed over to the American authorities. However, it is questionable whether the British government would even accept a decision by the ECHR. London is currently in dispute with the Court of Justice following it blocked the government’s decision to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, Africa.
In any case, Assange did not personally attend the court hearing yesterday. According to his lawyer, he felt “unwell.” His health is considered critical anyway. He has already had a stroke and recently suffered a broken rib due to spasmodic coughing fits. In addition, as his lawyer says, he has “mental problems.” His wife Stella blames the authorities for his condition: The prison cell in which Julian Assange has been imprisoned in the British high-security Belmarsh prison since 2019 is two by three meters in size. He is locked here alone for 21 hours a day.
The case has been on the attention of the world for 14 years. Assange became famous worldwide in the early 2010s. At that time, WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of internal US military documents in several rounds. This included, among other things, evidence that there were more civilian deaths at the hands of US and coalition troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan than Washington had publicly admitted. The explosive papers also suggested that the US was aware that Iraqi security forces were torturing prisoners of war. The revelations sparked an international outcry and left Washington scrambling to explain.
The fact that Assange is being held in a prison for terrorists and serious criminals is a “scandal,” criticizes Austrian human rights expert Manfred Nowak. Because actually it’s just a case of “extradition detention”. If he were to be extradited to the USA, the WikiLeaks founder would face even more difficult prison conditions.
But the case goes far beyond the person of Julian Assange. Assange’s extradition would have a disturbing impact on press freedom. Investigative journalism itself would be threatened and might be prosecuted worldwide as “espionage”.
WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks became known to the general public in 2009 when the platform published hundreds of thousands of messages from radio message receivers, so-called pagers. The messages were sent on the day of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. As of November 2010, the platform published more than 250,000 classified documents with the help of major international media companies. This leak, called “Cablegate,” partially exposed U.S. activities in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This also involved the killing of civilians and the mistreatment of prisoners.
With the publication, Assange became an enemy of the US state.
“Cablegate” would not have been possible without US military whistleblower Chelsea Manning: Manning forwarded more than 700,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks. In 2013, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for this, but was later released thanks to US President Barack Obama.
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