WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has fended off the threat of immediate extradition to the United States after the High Court in London said the US needed to provide more assurances. <\/p>\n
US authorities say Assange, 52, put lives at risk by publishing secret military documents and have for years been seeking his extradition on espionage charges. <\/p>\n
At a two-day hearing last month, Assange sought permission to review the UK\u2019s 2022 approval of his extradition to the US, arguing the case against him was politically motivated and that he would not face a fair trial. <\/p>\n
In a ruling Tuesday, a panel of two judges said Assange, an Australian citizen, would not be extradited immediately and gave the US three weeks to give a series of assurances around Assange\u2019s First Amendment rights and that he would not receive the death penalty. <\/p>\n
If the US fails to give these assurances, Assange would be allowed to appeal his extradition at a further hearing in May. <\/p>\n
Assange has fought extradition for the last five years from London\u2019s Belmarsh prison and for seven years before that was holed up as a political refugee at the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK capital. <\/p>\n
His case has sparked condemnation from free speech advocates who say if the extradition is allowed to go ahead it will have a chilling effect on press freedoms. <\/p>\n
The court said on Tuesday that Assange had a \u201creal prospect of success\u201d on three of the nine grounds of appeal: that his extradition is incompatible with freedom of expression; that, if extradited, Assange might be prejudiced at trial due to his nationality; and that, if extradited, he would not enjoy adequate death penalty protection. <\/p>\n
But the court refused to grant him leave to appeal on the ground that the prosecution is politically motivated. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe judge found, on the evidence, that Mr Assange had not shown that the request was made for the purpose of prosecuting him on account of his political opinions,\u201d it said. <\/p>\n
It said the judge had taken account of the evidence that the CIA had planned to kidnap Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy, but the judge \u201cconcluded that this was not related to the extradition proceedings.\u201d <\/p>\n
Assange\u00a0is being pursued by US authorities for endangering lives by publishing confidential military records supplied by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010 and 2011. <\/p>\n
In 2019, prosecutors in Virginia charged Assange with\u00a018 offences\u00a0including one charge of conspiracy to attempt to hack a computer in connection with the 2010 release of classified military material obtained through Manning and 17 additional counts under the Espionage Act. <\/p>\n
The prosecution alleges that Assange goaded Manning into obtaining thousands of pages of\u202funfiltered US diplomatic cables\u202fthat potentially endangered confidential sources, Iraq war-related significant activity reports and information related to Guantanamo Bay detainees. <\/p>\n
Each of those counts carries a potential sentence of 10 years, meaning that if convicted, Assange could be sentenced to up to 175 years in prison. <\/p>\n
He has been fighting the request for his extradition ever since. <\/p>\n
Assange\u00a0was not present at the crucial last-ditch hearing\u00a0in February\u00a0as he was too \u201cunwell\u201d to attend, according to one of his lawyers. <\/p>\n
His legal team had argued that the US request was in breach of their client\u2019s human rights, politically motivated and that his work was \u201cordinary journalistic practice\u201d which he shouldn\u2019t be punished for. <\/p>\n
They also claimed Assange was the subject of an alleged CIA assassination plot while he lived at his Ecuadorian safe haven between 2012 and 2019. \u201cThere is compelling evidence now in existence\u2026 that senior CIA and [US] administration officials requested detailed plans and drawings of [the plot],\u201d lawyer Edward Fitzgerald said. <\/p>\n
The allegation has never been tested evidentially but his legal team had argued that it should be considered and made part of the case. <\/p>\n\n
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has fended off the threat of immediate extradition to the United States after the High Court in London said the US needed to provide more assurances. US authorities say Assange, 52, put lives at risk by publishing secret military documents and have for years been seeking his extradition on espionage charges. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":17265,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17264","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17264\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}