After months of interruption due to the outbreak of the new Corona virus, the British judiciary on Monday will resume consideration of the request to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States, which wants to stand trial for publishing hundreds of thousands of confidential documents.

Assange (49 years) is being pursued by the US judiciary on charges of espionage in particular, and because of the publication since 2010 of more than 700 thousand confidential documents related to US military and diplomatic activities, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If convicted, he could be imprisoned for 175 years.

The United States accuses the founder of WikiLeaks of endangering American intelligence sources.

However, Assange's lawyers denounce, on their part, what they called a "political" process based on "lies".

The US Department of Justice toughened its accusations against the founder of Assange, by presenting new evidence that he had recruited hackers and conspiracy to break into computers.

This evidence supports 18 criminal charges facing Assange in the United States, and according to the indictment, Assange conspired with people from the hacking groups Lulzsik and Anonymous, among other charges.

New evidence indicates that Assange also gained unauthorized access to a government computer system of a NATO member state.

He was charged under the US Espionage Act for publishing in 2010 a large number of classified files that explain in detail aspects of the US military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ansar protests

Before reviewing the extradition request in London, which is scheduled to last three or four weeks, resumed, Assange's supporters called for a demonstration on Monday morning outside the Old Bailey criminal court.

Assange is currently in the high-security Belmarsh prison in London, and the UN rapporteur on torture has denounced his conditions of detention.

Assange's lawyer, Stella Morris, who became his partner, told The Times on Saturday that his extradition would amount to a "death sentence".

The 37-year-old woman is afraid that Assange will put an end to his life, and that the two children they gave birth to while they were in the Ecuadorian embassy in London will grow up without their father.

Assange was arrested in April 2019 after spending seven years behind the walls of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he sought refuge after his conditional release for fear of being deported to the United States.

Legal standards?

The decision goes back to the British judiciary on whether the American request to extradite Assange respects a number of legal criteria, especially in terms of determining whether it is inconsistent or inconsistent with human rights.

John Rees, one of the officials in the campaign against Assange's extradition, explained that whatever the decision was "almost certain" it would be appealed by the party that did not win the case.

One of his defense attorneys, Edward Fitzgerald, told the judge that the motives for the prosecutions against the founder of WikiLeaks were "political" and thus null, given that the US-British agreement "expressly prohibits" extraditions for "political crimes."

The lawyer accused US President Donald Trump of wanting to make his client a "model" in his "war against investigative journalists."

For his part, the representative of the United States, James Lewis, said that the founder of WikiLeaks "is not accused because he revealed embarrassing or disturbing information," but because he endangered American sources by publishing this amount of documents.

He pointed out that Assange is responsible for "one of the largest disclosures of classified information in the history of the United States."

Among the documents published, there is a video clip showing civilians killed by bullets from an American combat helicopter in Iraq in July 2007, including two journalists for Reuters.

Central to the discussions is also the issue of whether Assange is carrying out journalistic activities that should be protected as such.

About forty organizations defending human rights and freedom of the press called recently for the "immediate release" of Assange.

The French association "Ruban de Loi", which defends the rights of detainees, renewed its call for Paris to grant political asylum to Assange.

The request was vigorously defended last February by his French lawyer, Eric Dupont-Moretti, who left Assange's defense to become Minister of Justice.