Julian Assange’s legal team returned to London’s High Court on Tuesday to fight for what could become his final attempt at avoiding extradition to the United States, where he is facing life in prison if convicted on espionage charges.
After a years-long battle, the 52-year-old WikiLeaks founder is down to his only remaining legal avenue in the British justice system and now just two UK High Court judges stand between him and a possible flight across the Atlantic.
The two-day hearing will examine whether the embattled Australian should be granted leave to appeal a 2022 extradition decision made by former UK Home Secretary Priti Patel. If the court’s decision goes against Assange, he must be extradited within 28 days. However, his legal team is expected to apply to the European Court of Human Rights for an intervention to ground the flight through a rule 39 order.
Assange is wanted by US authorities on 18 criminal charges relating to his organization’s dissemination of classified material and diplomatic cables in 2010 and 2011.
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.
Tuesday’s hearing is the latest stage in a convoluted journey that has left Assange incarcerated at Belmarsh, a high-security prison in the south-east of the British capital, years after an undignified eviction from London’s Ecuadorian embassy.
Assange began his whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in 2006 in what he argued was a bid to challenge the West’s power structures and uphold human rights.
But his self-described quest for “radical transparency and truth,” combined with a polarizing personality, transformed him over the following years into a notorious character, earning him crusaders and critics in equal measure.
How we got here
Assange’s battle began in 2010 when then-little-known WikiLeaks started publishing huge quantities of classified documents related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Starting in April, the website posted a video showing a US military helicopter firing on and killing two journalists and several Iraqi civilians in 2007. Several months later, it disclosed more than 90,000 classified Afghan war documents dating back to 2004.
In 2012, Assange sought political asylum within the Ecuadorian embassy in west London. He remained there for almost seven years until the Metropolitan Police entered his safe haven in 2019 acting on an extradition warrant from the US Justice Department. British officers moved in after Ecuador withdrew his asylum and invited authorities into the embassy, citing Assange’s bad behavior.
The US want Assange to be brought to the US where he faces an 18-count indictment handed down by the Eastern District of Virginia. This alleges that the WikiLeaks founder actively solicited classified information, pushing former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to obtain thousands of pages of classified material and providing Assange with diplomatic State Department cables, Iraq war-related significant activity reports and information related to Guantanamo Bay detainees.
Two years later, a British judge rejected the US request on the grounds that such a move would be “oppressive” by reason of his mental health. The US continued to press for Assange’s extradition and successfully overturned the judge’s ruling months later after providing fresh assurances on Assange’s treatment in America.
What is his legal team asking for now?
At the hearing on Tuesday, Assange’s team was expected to assert that he is being extradited for political reasons and that a handover to the US violates the European Convention on Human Rights.
Assange did not attend the hearing as he is unwell, his lawyer Edward Fitzgerald told the court, the UK’s PA Media news agency reported.
Fitzgerald told the court Assange “is being prosecuted for engaging in ordinary journalistic practice of obtaining and publishing classified information, information that is both true and of obvious and important public interest.”
Ahead of the hearing, Assange’s wife Stella described her husband’s situation as “extremely grave.”
Speaking with reporters at a meeting organized by the Foreign Press Association on Thursday, she added: “It is the final hearing. If it doesn’t go Julian’s way, there is no possibility to appeal to the Supreme Court or anywhere else in this jurisdiction.”
She also emphasized her concerns for Assange’s wellbeing and said she fears that if extradited, he could take his own life. “His health is in decline, mentally and physically. His life is at risk every single day he stays in prison. If he is extradited, he will die.”
Why is his extradition controversial?
Supporters of Assange and human rights groups have long voiced concern over the US indictment, saying that if the extradition order is allowed to proceed it could have a radical effect on journalism.
“The risk to publishers and investigative journalists around the world hangs in the balance. Should Julian Assange be sent to the US and prosecuted there, global media freedoms will be on trial, too,” said Julia Hall, Amnesty International’s expert on counterterrorism and criminal justice in Europe, in a statement.
Rebecca Vincent, director of International Campaigns for Reporters Without Borders, said his case had “alarming implications for journalism and press freedom.”
“Not least of all, as he would be the first publisher tried under the US Espionage Act, which lacks a public interest defense,” Vincent said during a press conference last Thursday. “This means that this precedent could be applied to any others that publish stories based on classified documents, so that could affect any journalist – any mainstream media organization – anywhere in the world.”
“It’s a two-day hearing and obviously that reflects the number of issues that the defense sought to raise,” he explained. Vamos added that the judges would “be mindful that lots of people are paying attention” to Assange’s case and would likely take some time to consider the arguments presented.
This is a developing story – more to come.