Incarcerated in the United Kingdom, will Julian Assange be able to appeal his extradition to the United States? British justice must examine, Tuesday February 20 and Wednesday February 21, the refusal to authorize the founder of WikiLeaks to appeal the government’s decision to extradite him to the United States, which wishes to try him for a massive leak of documents .
“If he loses, there will be no further possibility of appealing” in the United Kingdom, his wife, Stella Assange, with whom he had two children when he was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. “We hope to have time to refer the matter to the European Court of Human Rights,” she said. If he is extradited, “he will die,” she warned last week.
Aged 52, Julian Assange faces up to one hundred and seventy-five years in prison. He is being prosecuted for having published, from 2010, more than 700,000 confidential documents – obtained thanks to American soldier Chelsea Manning – on the military and diplomatic activities of the United States, in particular in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among them was a video showing civilians, including two Reuters journalists, killed by fire from a US helicopter gunship in Iraq in July 2007.
Mr. Assange was arrested by British police in 2019 after living in seclusion at the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years to avoid extradition to Sweden in a rape investigation, which was dismissed in 2019. He is currently detained at Belmarsh high security prison, located in east London.
“Risk of suicide”
In January 2021, British justice ruled in favor of Mr. Assange. Citing a risk of suicide for the founder of WikiLeaks, judge Vanessa Baraitser refused to agree to extradition. “The mental condition of Julian Assange is such that it would be abusive to extradite him to the United States,” she estimated during the hearing.
This decision was subsequently overturned in June 2023 by the High Court of Justice in London. In early February, the UN special rapporteur on torture, independent expert Alice Jill Edwards, called on the British government to suspend extradition proceedings: “Julian Assange has long suffered from periodic depressive disorder. He has been assessed as a suicide risk. »
In an attempt to reassure him about the treatment that would be inflicted on him, the United States affirmed that he would not be incarcerated at the very high security ADX prison in Florence (Colorado), nicknamed the “Alcatraz of the Rockies”, and that he would receive clinical and psychological care. The Americans had also raised the possibility that he could ask to serve his sentence in Australia, where he is from. These guarantees have so far convinced the British justice system, but not at all the supporters of Julian Assange, who denounce political prosecutions.
The founder of WikiLeaks has also received numerous signs of support from Australia, notably from the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and from Parliament, which last week adopted a motion asking the United States to an end to their pursuits. “This matter cannot go on forever,” Mr Albanese told Parliament, adding that Australians on all sides agreed that “enough is enough”. Mr Albanese claimed he had spoken about Mr Assange’s case “at the highest levels” in the UK and US.
