Julian Assange’s partner said a decision to extradite WikiLeaks co-founder to the United States would be “politically and legally disastrous for Britain” on the eve of the judge’s decision.
Assange, 49, faces an 18-year indictment, claiming a conspiracy to break into computers and a conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information in a case that critics have considered a dangerous attack on press freedom.
On Monday in Old Bailey, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser will decide whether she should be extradited to face charges in the United States, where her lawyers say she will be sentenced to up to 175 years in prison. The US government says the sentence could be between four and six years.
Prior to Baraitser’s ruling, Stella Moris, who has two children with Assange, said a decision to allow extradition would not only be an “unimaginable transvestite” for her partner, but would affect her cherished British freedoms.
WikiLeaks publishes approximately 470,000 classified military documents on US diplomacy and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Subsequently, it releases an additional tranche of more than 250,000 classified American diplomatic cables.
A Swedish prosecutor is issuing a European arrest warrant for Assange on charges of sexual assault involving two Swedish women. Assange rejects the allegations.
A British judge decides that Assange can be extradited to Sweden. Assange fears that Sweden will hand him over to US authorities who may pursue him.
Assange is questioned in a two-day interview on allegations by Swedish authorities at the Ecuadorian embassy.
Britain rejects Ecuador’s request to grant Assange diplomatic status, which would allow him to leave the embassy without being arrested.
Police are arresting Assange at the US embassy after his asylum was withdrawn. He is accused by the US of “a federal charge of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion because he agreed to break a password on a classified US government computer.”
Assange’s extradition hearing begins at Crown Court in Woolwich, south-east London. After a week of opening the arguments, the extradition case is to be postponed until May. Additional delays are caused by the coronavirus outbreak.
A four-week hearing begins in Old Bailey, with the US government expecting Assange to try to recruit hackers to find classified government information. If the courts approve the extradition, the British government will still have the last word.
“It would rewrite the rules of what is allowed to be published here,” Moris wrote in the Mail on Sunday. “Overnight, it would defeat free and open debates about the abuses committed by our own government and many other foreign countries.
“In fact, foreign countries could simply issue an extradition request stating that journalists in the UK or Facebook users, in this regard, have violated their censorship laws. The press freedoms we cherish in Britain do not make sense if they can be incriminated and suppressed by the regimes in Russia or Ankara or by the prosecutors in Alexandria, Virginia. “
The case against Assange concerns the publication by WikiLeaks of hundreds of thousands of documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as on diplomatic cables, in 2010 and 2011.
Prosecutors say Assange helped U.S. defense analyst Chelsea Manning violate the Espionage Law, was complicit in piracy by others, and published classified information that endangered U.S. informants.
Assange denies plotting with Manning to crack an encrypted password on U.S. Department of Defense computers and says there is no evidence that anyone’s security has been compromised.
His lawyers say the prosecution is politically motivated and is being prosecuted because WikiLeaks has released US government documents that have revealed evidence of war crimes and human rights abuses.
Kristina Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, said: “The mere fact that this case has reached the court and not to mention this time is a historic, large-scale attack on freedom of expression.
“The US government should listen to the support of media publishers, NGOs around the world, such as Amnesty and Reporters Without Borders, and the United Nations, which is calling for these allegations to be dropped.”
Assange has been held in Belmarsh High Security Prison since police took him out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had taken refuge for seven years, and arrested him on bail.
The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Prof. Nils Melzer, who visited him in Belmarsh, said that Assange had all the symptoms associated with prolonged exposure to psychological torture and should not be extradited. The court found out that he had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, and the defense psychiatrists stated that he was suffering from severe depression and that he was at high risk of suicide.