British court allows Julian Assange to be extradited to the United States
The Appeals Chamber of the High Court of London on Friday overturned a ruling refusing to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States, which wants him to stand trial for leaking a huge amount of official documents.
"The court accepted the appeal," Judge Timothy Holroyd said.
The judge said he accepted a range of assurances from the United States regarding the circumstances of Assange's detention, including a pledge that he would not be held in ADX maximum security prison in Colorado and that he would be transferred to Australia to serve his sentence if convicted.
And the “Bloomberg” news agency said today, Friday, that this decision contradicts a lower court’s decision to prevent Assange from being sent to the United States to face criminal charges, fearing that prison conditions there will lead him to commit suicide.
But there are still other obstacles before Assange is extradited to the United States, as the legal dispute is likely to go to the Supreme Court, the last court of appeal.
In 2012, Assange, 50, went to the Ecuadorean embassy in London until he was arrested at the embassy in 2019 and then imprisoned, and since that time he has been fighting a battle against extradition attempts to face charges first in Sweden, then in America.
The Swedish case against him was dropped, but the US government accused him in 2019 of espionage, because of his role in the disclosure of hundreds of thousands of pages of classified documents, through WikiLeaks, with the help of US military intelligence analyst, Chelsea Manning.
The Australian-born Assange is being held at Belmarsh Prison in London.
The US authorities are charging Assange with 18 counts of leaking to WikiLeaks a large number of secret US military records and diplomatic cables that it said endangered lives.
Assange denied any wrongdoing and was not present in court.
On Friday, the Russian Foreign Ministry condemned the British court's decision to annul the decision to refuse the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States.
"This shameful decision in a political case against a journalist and a public figure," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on her account on the Telegram app.
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