The Royal Courts of Justice concluded that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can be extradited to the United States to face espionage charges, overturned a lower court verdict earlier this year.
Assange, 50 is wanted in the United States on allegations of disclosing national defense information after WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of classified military documents leaked during the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts a decade ago, according to the Xinhua news agency. Assange has been held at the high-security Belmarsh Prison in south London since 2019.
In January, a lower court rejected the US request to extradite Assange, concerns about his mental health and the possibility that the suffocating circumstances in US facilities would lead him to commit suicide.
In our judgment, that risk is avoided by the assurances supplied by the US authorities, Lord Chief Justice, Lord Burnett of Maldon stated in his judgment.
According to US lawyers, Assange will be permitted to return to Australia, where he was born, to spend whatever prison sentence he may get. The judges remanded the matter to the Westminster Magistrates’ Court. Judges ordered that the case must return to the Westminster Magistrates’ Court for a district judge to formally send it to British Home Secretary Priti Patel, who oversees law enforcement in the UK and will decide whether to extradite Assange.
