The US government has won an appeal to extradite Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, to the United Kingdom’s High Court.
Assange is now closer to being extradited from a British prison to the United States, where he would face spying charges stemming from WikiLeaks‘ publishing of classified military papers a decade ago, thanks to Friday’s decision, which overturned a previous decision.
Earlier this year, a lower court denied the US request to extradite Assange, claiming that Assange’s mental condition was too weak to endure the US legal system.
However, Assange “has no history of serious and chronic mental illness,” according to a US lawyer, James Lewis, and does not reach the threshold of being so unwell that he cannot resist killing himself.
Sweden issued an international arrest order for Assange in November 2010 following allegations of sexual assault. The claims, according to Assange, are a pretext for his extradition from Sweden to the United States for his role in the disclosure of classified American secrets. He breached bail and sought sanctuary in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in June 2012 after losing his appeal against extradition to Sweden.
Ecuador granted him political asylum in August 2012[11], based on the assumption that if he was transferred to Sweden, he would eventually be extradited to the United States. In 2019, Swedish prosecutors withdrew their investigation, claiming that their evidence had “much deteriorated due to the extended amount of time since the events in question.”