[ad_1]
Vanessa Baraitser, a judge at the Criminal Court of London, United Kingdom, has decided that Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, cannot be extradited to the United States. Baraitser explained in a long speech that, despite the operations carried out by Assange, including the dissemination of US documents secretly through WikiLeaks, they cannot be considered an investigative journalism work, at the moment there are no conditions for him to be extradited. . Baraitser motivated the decision by citing the health conditions of Assange, who suffers from depression and who, according to psychiatrists who visited him in prison, is suicidal. The United States can now decide whether to appeal the judge’s decision.
Julian Assange, 49, is accused in the United States of illegally hacking government sites and leaking documents containing records of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as diplomatic communications from 2010.
In May 2019, he was charged under the United States Anti-Espionage Act of 1917, the Espionage Act, for requesting, collecting and publishing American military and diplomatic documents. Had he been extradited, he would have been the first person charged under this law and could have received a sentence of up to 175 years in prison.
Many international commentators and activists had expressed concern that Assange, once extradited, could be subjected to ill-treatment and torture while in detention in the United States. In his defense, article 3 of the United Nations Convention on Human Rights was cited, according to which “no state may expel, return or extradite a person to another state where there are reasonable grounds to believe that he would run the risk of be subjected to torture “.
Since April 12, 2019, Assange has been incarcerated in the United Kingdom, in the maximum security prison of Belmarsh, in south-east London. From 2012 to 2019 she was given asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where she had arrived to avoid a previous conviction for rape in Sweden, which later expired. In April 2019, he was arrested for violating the terms of his political asylum. Assange’s arrest was for breach of bail in the UK in 2010 and on behalf of US authorities.
[ad_2]
