British justice overturned on appeal the refusal to extradite Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the United States on Friday.
Judge Tim Holroydez clarified that the first instance decision was set aside and that the British justice will have to rule again on the American extradition request.
On January 4, Judge Vanessa Baraitser refused her extradition during a hearing in the courtyard of the Old Bailey, London. The British judge had put forward the risks of “suicide […] for mental health reasons ”by Julian Assange to justify his decision.
In its decision this Friday, the High Court of London ruled that the United States has provided assurances on the treatment that would be reserved for the founder of WikiLeaks in the event of extradition, thus responding to the concerns of the trial judge.
For her part, Stella Moris, the companion of Julian Assange, immediately denounced a “serious miscarriage of justice”.
The 49-year-old Australian, founder of the Wikileaks site, is under prosecution against him under the presidency of Donald Trump. In the United States, he risks 175 years in prison for having disseminated, as of 2010, hundreds of thousands of classified documents. These concerned American military and diplomatic activities, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. In particular, a video had made a lot of noise. It showed civilians killed by fire from an American combat helicopter in Iraq in July 2007. Revelations which, according to Washington, had endangered the lives of American personnel, and their sources, on the spot.
Julian Assange was arrested in April 2019, after seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He had indeed taken refuge in the diplomatic building to avoid extradition to the United States or Sweden, where charges for rape, since abandoned, had been launched against him.
