In January,a lower court judge refused an American request to send Assange to the US to face spying charges over WikiLeaks’ publication of secret military documents a decade ago. District Judge Vanessa Baraitserdenied extradition on health grounds,saying Assange was likely to kill himself if held under harsh US prison conditions.
The judge ordered that Assange must remain in prison during any potential US appeal,ruling that the Australian citizen “has an incentive to abscond” if he were freed.
Assange,50,has been in London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison since he was arrested in April 2019 for skipping bail seven years earlier during a separate legal battle.
Assange spent seven years holed up inside Ecuador’s London embassy,where he fled in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault. Sweden dropped the sex crimes investigations in November 2019 because so much time had elapsed.
US prosecutors have indicted Assange on 17 espionage charges and one charge of computer misuse over WikiLeaks’ publication of thousands of leaked military and diplomatic documents. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison.
The prosecutors say Assange unlawfully helped US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal classified diplomatic cables and military files that WikiLeaks later published. Lawyers for Assange argue that he was acting as a journalist and is entitled to First Amendment freedom of speech protections for publishing documents that exposed US military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan.