WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange leaves Westminster Magistrates Court in London, Britain.
Henry Nicholls | Reuters
A British judge has rejected the newest attempt by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to fight extradition to america to face spying charges.
High Court justice Jonathan Swift said a recent appeal would simply “re-run” arguments that Assange’s lawyers had already made and lost.
Assange has battled in British courts for years to avoid being sent to the U.S., where he faces 17 charges of espionage and one charge of computer misuse over WikiLeaks’ publication of classified diplomatic and military documents greater than a decade ago.
In 2021, a British district judge ruled that Assange should not be extradited because he was prone to kill himself if held under harsh U.S. prison conditions. U.S. authorities later provided assurances that the Australia-born Assange would not face the severe treatment that his lawyers said would put his physical and mental health in danger.
Those assurances led Britain’s High Court and Supreme Court to overturn the lower court’s ruling, and the British government authorized extradition in June 2022.
Assange is looking for to halt extradition by obtaining a recent court hearing on parts of his case that were dismissed by the primary judge.
But in a ruling made public on Friday, Swift said all eight parts of Assange’s potential appeal weren’t “arguable” and shouldn’t be heard.
“The proposed appeal involves not more than an try and re-run the extensive arguments made to and rejected by the district judge,” he said.
Assange’s wife, Stella Assange, said the WikiLeaks founder would make a recent appeal attempt at a High Court hearing on Tuesday. He has almost exhausted his avenues of appeal within the U.K. but could still attempt to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights.
“We remain optimistic that we are going to prevail and that Julian is not going to be extradited to america, where he faces charges that would end in him spending the remaining of his life in a maximum-security prison for publishing true information that exposed war crimes committed by the US government,” Stella Assange said on Twitter.
Assange’s supporters and lawyers maintain he was acting as a journalist and is entitled to First Amendment protections of freedom of speech. They argue that the case is politically motivated, that he would face inhumane treatment and be unable to get a good trial within the U.S.
Assange, 51, stays in London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison, where he has been since he was arrested in 2019 for skipping bail during a separate legal battle. Before that, he spent seven years contained in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.
Sweden dropped the sex crimes investigations in November 2019 because a lot time had elapsed, but British judges have kept Assange in prison pending the final result of the U.S. extradition case.
