Wikileaks founder will not yet be extradited – VG

The United States will sue the founder of Wikileaks for piracy and espionage.

Judge Vanessa Baraitser of the Woolwich Crown Court in London read the surprising ruling on Monday. Assange’s supporters expected him to be extradited.

“The overall impression is of a depressed and sometimes desperate man who fears for his future,” Judge Vanessa Baraitser said when she summarized documentation Monday that Assange was hurting himself and had suicidal thoughts, according to the BBC.

The decision was greeted with glee outside the courtroom in London.

– This is not a victory for freedom of expression, the chairman of the board of the Norwegian freedom of expression organization Kjersti Løken Stavrum tells VG.

She believes that the British judge has sidestepped the problem.

– The judge rejects all the factual arguments, but rejects the extradition for medical reasons, says the PEN leader.

The defense has stated that the prosecution is politically motivated. They have also argued that Assange suffers from severe depression and has suicidal thoughts. The 49-year-old man will be diagnosed with Asperger’s and autism.

I am glad that he is not extradited

She says Norwegian PEN is happy the Wikileaks founder is not extradited.

– We hope the United States will drop the case and not anchor, Stavrum says.

Here, Assange is arrested in London on April 11, 2019:

Signature of Law Commentator and Attorney Joshua Rozenberg Twitter that the United States has already confirmed that the verdict is being appealed.

Judge Baraitser believes Assange went beyond the role of an investigative journalist, cracking a password for the US Department of Defense and getting Chelsea Manning to upload secret documents to a secure cloud solution.

The Norwegian PEN isn’t sure what the long-term verdict means for Assange and the problem: that he released information about American war crimes that authorities did not disclose.

– It’s not just about their freedom of expression, but about everyone’s right to be informed, says Kjersti Løken Stavrum.

Stavrum is also the managing director of the Tinius Foundation, which is the largest owner of the Schibsted media group. She has also been appointed president of the new Commission on Freedom of Expression.

Revealed killings of civilians

Ten years have passed since the whistleblower website published secret military reports of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Guantanamo detention camp. The whistleblower website also posted 250,000 internal notes from the US embassies.

A video posted by Wikileaks allegedly showing US soldiers in Apache helicopters shooting and killing journalists and civilians in Baghdad, attracted worldwide attention in April 2010.

The documents revealed the murder of innocent people and the mistreatment and torture of prisoners. A few months after publication, Julian Assange was charged with rape in Sweden and requested extradition. He applied for asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012.

The Wikileaks founder lost his asylum status and was arrested by British police in April 2019. A year later, he had served a sentence for violating bail conditions, but was sent to a high-security prison pending the case. extradition against the United States.

Accused of espionage

The US Department of Justice first accused Assange of complicity in a data breach, in a “conspiracy” with whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who leaked Wikileaks military documents in 2010.

Intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning served seven years for espionage before being sentenced by President Barack Obama to 35 years in prison.

After Assange was arrested in 2019, the United States expanded the charge to 17 counts of espionage. His attorneys believe he risks 30 to 40 years in prison if convicted of receiving the Manning leaks and releasing the defense secrets.

The data breach charge has a lighter penalty.

United States: four to six years in prison

According to The Guardian, the US government has stated that the sentence will likely be between four and six years in prison, according to The Guardian.

Assange has denied conspiring with Manning to crack a password on the US Department of Defense computers and says the revelations have not been shown to endanger anyone’s safety.

Human rights and press organizations fear that the prosecution of Julian Assange will hit critical journalism.

He rejected the defense arguments

Wikileaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson has previously stated that the fact that the extradition case has reached the courts is a historic, large-scale attack on press freedom.

Lawyers representing the United States deny that the extradition request is politically motivated. They believe that Assange endangered the lives of the US agents by publishing the classified documents.

American lawyers believe that many of the arguments in their defense must be presented at trial and have nothing to do with the issue of extradition, according to Reuters.

Judge Vanessa Baraitser rejected almost all the arguments of Assange’s defenders, according to Reuters. But he said he could not extradite him to the United States because there is a real risk that he will take his own life.