Supporters of Julian Assange protest outside a court in London on May 1, 2019. -
Matt Dunham / AP / SIPA
Claimed by the United States who want to try him for espionage after the publication of hundreds of thousands of confidential documents, the founder of WikiLeaksJulian Assange will know Monday whether the British justice approves or refuses his extradition.
Become for his support a symbol of the fight for the freedom to inform, the Australian of 49 years must be fixed on his fate by the judge Vanessa Baraitser Monday morning at the court of the Old Bailey, in London.
Whatever the decision, it is open to appeal, so the legal battle is unlikely to end there in the UK.
It also remains to be seen what will be the attitude of the administration of future US President Joe Biden towards the founder of WikiLeaks.
Julian Assange is facing prosecution under President Donald Trump.
Under his predecessor Barack Obama, who had Joe Biden as vice-president, American justice had given up on prosecuting the founder of WikiLeaks.
But just 10 years ago, the one who will accede to the White House in less than a month compared Julian Assange to a "high-tech terrorist".
Lawyer Stella Moris, with whom Julian Assange had two children, said in an interview with the German newspaper
Der Spiegel
published on Sunday that at the London high-security prison of Belmarsh, where he is being held, "he never saw none of his lawyers since March ”.
“Julian's defense was seriously handicapped,” she denounced.
But "the situation at Belmarsh prison is nothing compared to the conditions of detention to which he would be subjected in the United States if he were extradited", she affirmed, estimating that Julian Assange would then be "buried alive" .
The Australian faces 175 years in prison in the United States for having disseminated, from 2010, more than 700,000 classified documents on American military and diplomatic activities, in particular in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Civilians killed by Americans
The United States accuses the founder of WikiLeaks of having endangered American service sources, an accusation he disputes.
Among the published documents was a video showing civilians killed by US gunship fire in Iraq in July 2007, including two journalists from Reuters.
It is up to British justice to determine whether the American request for extradition submitted to it meets a certain number of legal criteria, and in particular if it is not disproportionate or incompatible with human rights.
Kristinn Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, told AFP on Sunday that it was "almost certain" that the court will rule against Julian Assange, denouncing "biases" in the proceedings.
In a statement sent over the weekend, he also said that "the mere fact that this case has been taken to court, and that it has lasted for so long, constitutes a historic large-scale attack on the freedom of expression ”.
During the five-week hearings in February and September, lawyers for Julian Assange denounced a “political” procedure based on “lies”.
However, they point out, the American-British agreement “expressly” prohibits extraditions for “political offenses”.
Julian Assange was arrested in April 2019 after seven years behind the walls of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had taken refuge after violating his bail conditions, fearing extradition to the United States or Sweden, where he was the subject of charges for rape that he contests and which have since been dropped.
The conditions of detention of the founder of WikiLeaks have been denounced by the UN rapporteur on torture Niels Melzer.
In an open letter to Donald Trump on December 22, this defender of Julian Assange asked the outgoing US president to pardon the founder of WikiLeaks, who he said is "not an enemy of the American people."
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