(Bloomberg) — British judges granted a U.S. request to extradite Julian Assange, in a remarkable legal blow to the man who has spent almost a decade fighting attempts to remove him from Britain.
The decision reverses a lower court’s ruling that had blocked the WikiLeaks founder from being sent to the U.S. to face criminal charges, for fear that prison conditions there would result in his suicide. The case will now be referred to the U.K. Home Office.
The judges accepted U.S. assurances to the U.K. that he won’t face solitary confinement or supermax prison in Colorado if he’s jailed in the U.S. They said he can serve his sentence in Australia if convicted.
Assange, 50, has been in prison or in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012, as he fought attempts to send him to face charges first in Sweden and then in the U.S.
The Swedish case against him was dropped, but the U.S. government in 2019 charged him with espionage for his role in releasing hundreds of thousands of pages of classified documents via WikiLeaks, with the help of U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. Australian-born Assange is being held in London’s Belmarsh prison.
He can appeal the ruling.
Assange’s lawyers have said he might commit suicide in a U.S. jail, an argument that a lower court judge agreed to in January when she blocked his extradition. Assange would face “conditions of significant isolation” in U.S. prison, Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled, citing Jeffrey Epstein’s 2019 death as an example of when preventative measures weren’t able to protect inmates from self harm.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
