London court authorizes extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to US

The London High Court upheld the US appeal and overturned the injunction against the extradition of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. About it informs Sky News.

Assange’s defense has the right to challenge this verdict.

This July, the court in Ecuador deprived the founder of Wikileaks, the citizenship of the republic, which he received in December 2017 – after five years in the building of the country’s embassy in London. There he was hiding from the British police, who were going to extradite him to the Swedish authorities as part of a criminal investigation into rape (the case was closed in 2020).

In 2019, Assange was arrested by the British police. Before that, the Ecuadorian embassy deprived him of his asylum. Then Foreign Minister Jose Valencia and Interior Minister Maria Paula Romo accused Assange of riding a scooter through the embassy’s cramped corridors, insulting employees and smearing feces on the walls. The Ecuadorian government was also unhappy with Assange’s support for the Catalan independence movement.

Julian Assange is now in the Belmarsh maximum security prison. He was sentenced to 50 months in prison for violating the terms of bail and hiding in the embassy.

Assange faces 175 years in prison in the United States. Moreover, in January, the British judge rejected Washington’s request for Assange’s extradition, ruling that such a move would be “repressive” given his mental health.

The American side accuses Julian Assange of espionage and disclosure of classified information, including the publication of letters from the hacked servers of the Democratic Party on the WikiLeaks portal. The project published top-secret materials obtained from anonymous sources, including Pentagon documents on the course of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.