It was a significant victory for WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange when the London High Court decided on Monday (May 20) that the US assurances regarding his case were inadequate and granted him a full appeal hearing, reported Reuters.
In a brief ruling, two senior high court judges determined that the US submissions were insufficient, allowing the appeal to proceed.
In March, the court had provisionally granted Assange, 52, permission to appeal on three grounds. However, it allowed the US to provide satisfactory assurances that it would not seek the death penalty and would permit him to invoke a First Amendment right to free speech in a trial.
Earlier in the day, Assange’s wife, Stella, arrived at the London High Court before the judgment. Speaking at a press conference, Stella expressed hope that the court would rule in her husband’s favor.
“We hope that the courts do the right thing today and find in Julian’s favor. But if they don’t, we will take an emergency injunction, we will seek an emergency injunction from the European Court of Human Rights,” Stella said.
Who is Julian Assange?
Born in 1971, Julian Assange is an Australian editor and activist. He founded WikiLeaks in 2006.
WikiLeaks rose to prominence in April 2010 when it published a classified video depicting a 2007 US helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in Baghdad, Iraq. The website has released thousands of classified US military documents on the Afghanistan war and hundreds of thousands of US secret files on the Iraq war.
Assange has been fighting extradition from the United Kingdom (UK) to the US, where he faces criminal charges for releasing confidential American military records and diplomatic cables.
What would’ve happened if Assange was extradited?
If Assange had been extradited, the 52-year-old could have faced up to 175 years in a maximum security prison.
Assange was first arrested in the UK in 2010 on a Swedish warrant over sex crime allegations that were later dropped. Since then, he has been under house arrest, sheltered in Ecuador’s embassy in London for seven years, and, since 2019, held in the Belmarsh high-security prison, awaiting a ruling on his extradition.
If the high court judges had ruled in favor of the extradition, Assange’s legal options in the UK would have been exhausted, and his lawyers would have sought an emergency injunction from the European Court of Human Rights to block deportation pending a full hearing, reported Reuters.
However, in this case, the judges rejected the US assurances, allowing Assange to appeal his extradition case, with the appeal potentially not being heard until next year.