Julian Assange is not there Supreme Court, London for the final appeal against him delivery in the USA because he is “not feeling well”. This was stated by one of the lawyers of the Australian journalist and co-founder of Wikileaks, who is imprisoned in the maximum security Belmarsh prison in the British capital.
Today and tomorrow are the two crucial hearings before Supreme Court justices to decide the fate of the final appeal by the WikiLeaks co-founder's defense against his highly controversial extradition case from the UK to the US. If the appeal is not upheld, the legal options in the British courts would be exhausted and the only possible option would be at the European Court of Human Rights.
Assange: Final appeal against extradition to the USA begins
Assange is accused of publishing around 700,000 secret documents related to US military and diplomatic activities since 2010. If found guilty, he faces a monstrous sentence of up to 175 years in an American prison. The activist's wife, Stella, also reiterated yesterday that the case is “essentially intended to determine whether he will live or die”, as the Wikileaks founder is already significantly weakened physically and mentally due to his incarceration in Belmarsh, a high-security prison that began in 2019 the British capital.
Before Royal Courts of Justice in London, seat of the High Court, demonstration with dozens of supporters of Assage and Wikileaks. Several activists took an improvised position to demand the journalist's release and called for freedom of the press and the defense of human rights.
“He is not well today, he is not present,” Assange's lawyer Edward Fitzgerald said, without giving further details, at the start of the hearing, which is crucial for the journalist's future as it represents the last possible legal action Kingdom to stop his transfer to the United States. It is not the first time that the activist does not attend a hearing: this has already happened in the past, and Assange had preferred the possibility of a video connection from his cell due to a state of health that was repeatedly certified as precarious by third parties – party doctors and delegations of international organizations and what has long been reflected in the appearance of premature aging evident in the few published images of him. Earlier, the activist's wife, Stella Assange, thanked the many demonstrators who gathered for hours outside the main Supreme Court for “supporting” Julian at that moment.
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