After a massive leak of documents, the United States wants to try for espionage the soon-to-be 51-year-old Australian, who faces up to 175 years in prison in this case denounced by human rights organizations as a serious attack on the freedom of the press.

With the order signed Friday by British Home Secretary Priti Patel, at the end of a very long legal saga, he sees the disappearance of one of his last hopes of escaping his extradition but has made it known that he would appeal.

marriage in prison

The United States accuses Julian Assange of having disseminated, from 2010 on his WikiLeaks platform, more than 700,000 documents concerning Washington's military and diplomatic activities, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He has been held in Belmarsh high security prison in east London since April 2019, after being taken from the Ecuadorian embassy, ​​where he had taken refuge seven years earlier, disguised as a courier.

At the time he was under rape charges in Sweden, which have since been dropped.

During his years in these diplomatic premises, Assange had two children with Stella Moris, one of his lawyers whom he married behind bars last March.

Stella Moris wearing her wedding dress designed by Vivienne Westwood in a hotel room in London on March 23, 2022 with her two children before her marriage to Julien Assange DYLAN MARTINEZ POOL/AFP/Archives

His image as a white-haired "cyber-warrior" has blurred over the years, particularly with his platform's 2016 broadcast during the US presidential campaign of thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic Party and the government. Hillary Clinton's team.

These revelations had then aroused strong praise from candidate Donald Trump.

According to the CIA, these documents were obtained from Russian agents, which WikiLeaks denies.

This episode fueled the suspicions, by its detractors, of collusion with Russia by a Julian Assange whose revelations are often made to the detriment of the United States, and who collaborated with the television channel RT, close to the Kremlin.

"Free the Press"

The Australian started life tossed from right to left by his mother, Christine Ann Assange, a theater artist separated from her father before she was born.

He compares his childhood to that of Tom Sawyer, between building rafts and exploring his environment.

At 15, he has already lived in more than 30 Australian cities before settling in Melbourne where he studies mathematics, physics and computer science.

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, speaks on the balcony of the Ecuadorian ambassador in London, May 19, 2017 Justin TALLIS AFP/Archives

Snapped up by the hacker community, he began to hack the websites of NASA or the Pentagon using the pseudonym "Mendax".

When he launched WikiLeaks to "liberate the press" and "unmask state secrets and abuses", he became, according to one of his biographers, "the most dangerous man in the world".

It became known to the general public in 2010 with the publication of hundreds of thousands of American documents.

He is then presented as a champion of the freedom to inform.

Ten years before his election to the presidency of the United States, Joe Biden, then vice-president of Barack Obama, considered that Julian Assange was more akin to a "high-tech terrorist" than to an heir to the "Pentagon papers" having revealed in the 1970s the lies of the United States about the Vietnam War.

“According to the North American vice-president, the truth about the United States is terrorism,” Assange retorted.

His notoriety grew, criticisms piled up.

In 2011, the five newspapers (including The New York Times, The Guardian and Le Monde) associated with WikiLeaks condemned the organisation's method, which made public unredacted telegrams from the US State Department.

They believe that the documents are likely to "put certain sources at risk".

But a hard core has remained loyal to her, like the British designer Vivienne Westwood, and a number of associations of journalists or the defense of human rights.

Stella Assange, wife of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, talks to journalists, April 23, 2022 in Brussels JOHN THYS AFP

“It is a dark day for press freedom and British democracy,” his wife Stella Assange said on Friday.

"Julian has done nothing wrong. He has committed no crime and is not a criminal. He is a journalist and publisher, and he is being punished for doing his job."

© 2022 AFP