“WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is now back in the spotlight after the Biden administration challenged a British judge’s decision last month to deny extradition. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is now back in the spotlight after Joe Biden’s government challenged a British judge’s decision last month to deny extradition. London District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser set a deadline of Friday (12) for the U.S. to appeal the ruling.
On January 4 this year, the British court rejected a request for extradition by the U.S. Department of Justice on the grounds of “risk of suicide”. Before, Assange had to the then U.S. President Trump (Donald Trump) to request a pardon; at the same Time, again released a batch of heavy declassified documents, respectively, pointed to the former U.S. President Barack Obama (Barack Obama) and former Secretary of State Hillary (Hillary Clinton) and other predators. At that time, Trump was deep in the “swamp” of the election, in a critical moment, seems to have no time to care. His application was not followed up.
On Feb. 9, U.S. Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi said the current Biden Administration continues to challenge a British judge’s decision last month to deny extradition and seek Assange’s extradition. Discussions about extraditing Assange from the U.S. began about a decade ago under the Obama administration, when Biden was vice president.
WikiLeaks angered the United States with the release of tens of thousands of secret documents about the U.S. military and intelligence services in 2010 and 2011. In addition, WikiLeaks also released Hillary emails obtained through hacking during the 2016 election campaign. Hillary and her supporters claimed that this was a factor in Trump’s defeat of Hillary in that year’s election.
The extradition case has been pending in the U.K. District Court since Feb. 24, 2020.
Julian Assange was born in July 1971 in Townsville, northeastern Australia, and will turn 50 this year.
Assange founded the WikiLeaks website with a partner in 2006, which allows people to submit leaked documents anonymously.
In early 2010, WikiLeaks published a classified U.S. military video showing an aerial attack by a U.S. Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 that killed more than a dozen people, including two Reuters employees. This put WikiLeaks and Assange in the public eye.
Since then, WikiLeaks has published hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables, including U.S. assessments of world leaders, ranging from Russian President Vladimir Putin to members of the Saudi royal Family.
In November 2010, Swedish prosecutors charged Assange with rape during his stay in Sweden in August of that year. Assange, who is in the United Kingdom, denied all charges after being arrested by British police.
To avoid being extradited to Sweden on sexual assault charges, Assange hid in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and was granted asylum from 2012 until 2019. And the Swedish judiciary eventually dropped the charges.
In April 2019, the regime change in Ecuador ended Assange’s asylum. He was then re-arrested by British police and sentenced to 50 weeks in jail for violating his bail in the first place.
According to his lawyers, doctors and UN experts, Assange was physically and mentally traumatized during his stay in Ecuadorian embassy asylum.
What Assange and WikiLeaks have done is highly controversial worldwide. The U.S. prosecution has filed 18 charges against Assange, including hacking into government computer systems and violating counterintelligence laws. If convicted on all charges, Assange will face a maximum sentence of 175 years. Assange himself denies all the charges, and his lawyers accuse the U.S. side of prosecuting Assange as politically motivated and abusing its power, which would stifle press freedom. Many prominent figures and international organizations have also expressed support and solidarity with Assange.
Journalists, and the American Civil Liberties Union and other 24 human rights organizations published an open letter to Acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson on Tuesday (Feb. 9), in which they asked President Joe Biden to drop the spying charges against Assange. In the letter, the groups said that charging Assange with espionage would threaten the freedom of the press and set a “precedent” for defining journalism as a criminal offense, noting that the release of government documents is intended to benefit the public, not harm them.
Assange supporters have been pressuring the Biden administration to withdraw extradition proceedings initiated by his predecessor, Donald Trump, within the first 100 days of Biden’s ascension to the White House.
That year, the Obama administration’s Justice Department reportedly decided not to seek Assange’s extradition on the grounds that what Assange and WikiLeaks were doing was too similar to journalistic activities protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
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