London’s Westminster Magistrates Court on Wednesday ruled that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be extradited to the United States, where he faces espionage charges.
The court ruling was referred to the British Home Secretary Priti Patel to decide on the extradition request submitted by Washington, within 4 weeks.
This ruling does not mean that the legal options available to Assange to avoid extradition to the United States have expired, and his lawyer can still turn to Patel to request the order to be rescinded, as well as to file an appeal against it to the Supreme Court.
The court’s decision comes in the context of a marathon legal struggle that Assange is waging against the British authorities to avoid extradition to the United States, which wants to punish him for publishing “WikiLeaks” thousands of sensitive documents related to Washington’s military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its relations with other countries.
After the decision was issued, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristen Hrafnsson said: “The British court has signed a decision to kill Assange, by extraditing him to the United States.”
Weeks ago, the London court set April 20 to extradite Assange to the United States of America, after he was accused of “conspiring to hack into the computers of the US Department of Defense.”
The British Supreme Court refused, earlier, to consider a request submitted by Assange not to extradite him to the United States, so that the British judiciary later allowed him to appeal to the British Supreme Court the decision of the judiciary that authorized his extradition to the United States.
In their decision, the High Court judges said: “The final decision rests with the Supreme Court, Britain’s highest judicial body, to allow or not allow the 50-year-old Australian to appeal.”
In 2012, the founder of “WikiLeaks” had resorted to the Ecuadorean embassy in London to prevent his extradition to Sweden, and he remained inside the embassy until April 2019, when the Ecuadorean government decided to deprive him of diplomatic refuge, and the British authorities arrested him immediately, although the charges against him were dropped. Him in Sweden about until then.
Since then, Assange has been held at Belmarsh Maximum Security Prison in London.
United States of AmericaBritainWikiLeaks