London:
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will appear in a British court on Tuesday for a last chance to prevent his extradition to the United States to face criminal charges including under the Espionage Act.
Who is Julian Assange?
Assange was born in Townsville, Australia, in July 1971 to parents who worked in theater and traveled frequently.
Assange gained a reputation as a veteran computer programmer as a teenager and was arrested in 1995 and pleaded guilty to hacking charges. He was fined but could avoid jail time as long as he didn’t repeat the offence. In his 20s, he went to the University of Melbourne to study mathematics and physics.
What is WikiLeaks?
Assange launched WikiLeaks in 2006, creating a web-based “dead letter drop” for potential leakers.
The site gained notoriety in April 2010 after it published a classified video showing a 2007 attack by U.S. helicopters in the Iraqi capital Baghdad that killed more than a dozen people, including two Reuters news staff.
It released more than 90,000 classified U.S. military documents on the war in Afghanistan, and about 400,000 secret U.S. files on the war in Iraq. The two leaks were the largest such security breaches in U.S. military history.
Subsequently, U.S. embassies around the world released 250,000 secret diplomatic cables, some of which were published by newspapers such as The New York Times and The Guardian.
The leaks have angered and embarrassed U.S. politicians and military officials, who say unauthorized dissemination puts lives at risk.
Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning served seven years in a military prison for leaking hundreds of thousands of messages and cables to WikiLeaks before being released on the order of President Barack Obama.
Arrest and commence legal proceedings
On November 18, 2010, a Swedish court ordered the detention of Assange following an investigation into sex crime charges against two Swedish female WikiLeaks volunteers. On December 7, 2010, Assange was arrested by British police on a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) issued by Sweden.
Assange has denied the accusations and said from the beginning he viewed the Swedish case as a pretext to extradite him to the United States to face WikiLeaks charges.
In February 2011, Sweden ordered his extradition to Sweden for trial, but his appeal subsequently failed. In June 2012, shortly after the UK Supreme Court rejected his final challenge, he entered the Ecuadorian embassy in London and sought asylum.
Assange worked at the Ecuadorian embassy for seven years
On August 16, 2012, Ecuador offered asylum to Assange, and British police sent round-the-clock guards to prevent him from escaping, saying he would be arrested if he left.
The impasse has left Assange living in cramped quarters at the embassy. Swedish prosecutors dropped the investigation in 2017, but British police said he would still be arrested if he left the embassy after previously failing to post bail.
While at the embassy, he had two children with his partner Stella Moris.
Embassy standoff ends, US case begins
On April 11, 2019, after Ecuador revoked his political asylum, a screaming Assange was taken out of the embassy and arrested.
The following month he was jailed for 50 weeks for breaching bail conditions. In June 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice formally requested that the United Kingdom extradite him to the United States to face 18 charges of conspiring to hack into U.S. government computers and violating espionage laws.
Although Assange was released from prison in September 2019, he is still being held in Belmarsh maximum security prison pending an extradition hearing.
On January 4, 2021, a British judge ruled that Assange should not be extradited to the United States, saying that his mental health problems meant he would be at risk of suicide.
However, US authorities won an appeal against this decision at London’s High Court in December 2021 after providing a package of guarantees on Assange’s post-conviction detention conditions, including a promise that he could be transferred to Australia to serve his sentence.
Assange married his long-term partner Stella on 23 March 2022 in Belmarsh.
A final legal battle?
In June 2022, Britain’s then Home Secretary (Minister of the Interior) Priti Patel approved the extradition, and a judge at the High Court in London rejected his appeal last year.
In two days of hearings starting on Tuesday, Assange’s legal team will begin a final attempt to overturn the extradition decision in a British court before two senior judges.
If he wins, his case will move to a full appeal. If he loses the case, the only remaining extradition obstacle lies with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), where he has already filed an application, which could block his extradition.
Assange’s supporters say that if Assange is extradited, he may be held in a high-security prison in the United States and could face 175 years in prison if convicted. U.S. prosecutors said that would not exceed 63 months.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
