LONDON (Portal) – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will face what could be his final chance in an English court on Tuesday to stop his extradition to the United States, where he faces criminal charges including espionage.
Assange was born in July 1971 in Townsville, Australia, to parents who were involved in theater and traveled frequently.
As a teenager, Assange gained a reputation as a sophisticated computer programmer. In 1995 he was arrested and found guilty of hacking attacks. He was fined but avoided prison on the condition he did not re-offend. In his late 20s he went to Melbourne University to study mathematics and physics.
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Assange started WikiLeaks in 2006, creating a web-based “dead letter drop” for would-be leakers.
The site gained notoriety in April 2010 when it published a secret video showing a 2007 U.S. helicopter strike that killed a dozen people in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, including two Portal news employees.
It released more than 90,000 secret U.S. military documents on the war in Afghanistan and about 400,000 secret U.S. files on the Iraq War. The two leaks represented the largest security breaches of their kind in U.S. military history.
As a result, 250,000 secret diplomatic cables were released from US embassies around the world, with some of the information published by newspapers such as the New York Times and the British Guardian.
The revelations angered and embarrassed U.S. politicians and military officials, who said the unauthorized distribution put lives at risk.
Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning served seven years in a military prison for leaking hundreds of thousands of messages and cables to WikiLeaks before being released on orders from President Barack Obama.
Arrest and start of legal dispute
On November 18, 2010, a Swedish court ordered Assange's imprisonment as a result of an investigation into allegations of sex crimes by two Swedish WikiLeaks volunteers. On December 7, 2010, Assange was arrested by British police under a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) issued by Sweden.
Assange has denied the allegations and said from the outset that he believed the Swedish case was a pretext for his extradition to the United States, where he would face charges over the WikiLeaks publications.
His extradition to Sweden for questioning was ordered in February 2011 and his subsequent appeals failed. In June 2012, shortly after the UK Supreme Court rejected his latest appeal, he entered the Ecuadorian embassy in London and requested asylum.
ASSANGE'S SEVEN YEARS IN THE ECUADORIAN EMBASSY
Ecuador granted Assange asylum on August 16, 2012. British police kept a round-the-clock guard to prevent his escape and said he would be arrested if he left.
The impasse left Assange living in cramped conditions at the embassy. Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation in 2017, but British police said he would still be arrested if he left the embassy because he had previously failed to bail.
During his time in the embassy, he had two children with his partner Stella Moris.
The impasse in the embassy ends, the case in the USA begins
On April 11, 2019, a screaming Assange was carried out of the embassy and arrested after Ecuador revoked his political asylum.
The following month he was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for breaching his bail conditions. In June 2019, the US Justice Department formally asked Britain to extradite him to the United States, where he would face 18 counts of conspiring to hack US government computers and violating espionage laws.
Although Assange completed his sentence in September 2019, he remained in the high-security Belmarsh prison pending extradition hearings.
On January 4, 2021, a British judge ruled that Assange should not be extradited to the United States because his mental health issues put him at risk of suicide.
However, US authorities won an appeal in London's High Court against that decision in December 2021 after making a number of assurances about Assange's prison conditions if convicted, including a promise that he could be transferred to Australia. to serve any sentence.
On March 23, 2022, Assange married his long-term partner Stella in Belmarsh.
In June 2022, then-British Home Secretary Priti Patel agreed to the extradition, and last year a judge at London's High Court rejected his request for an appeal.
At a two-day hearing starting on Tuesday before two senior judges, Assange's legal team will make a final attempt to overturn the extradition decision in the English courts.
If he is successful, his case will be appealed. If he loses, the only remaining block on his extradition lies with the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), where he has already filed an application that could stop his extradition.
If Assange is extradited, his supporters say he could be held in a high-security US prison and face a sentence of 175 years in prison if convicted. U.S. prosecutors said it would take no more than 63 months.
(Reporting by Michael Holden; Editing by Ros Russell)
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