The UK has approved the extradition of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange to the United States. British Home Secretary Priti Patel approved the extradition. WikiLeaks immediately said it would file an appeal against it in the high court.
The case was passed to the Home Office last month after the UK supreme court ruled that there were no legal questions over assurances given by American authorities over how Assange was likely to be treated.
WikiLeaks said that Patel’s decision was “not the end of the fight,” but only the beginning of a new legal battle.
The statement said that anyone who cared about freedom of expression should be “ashamed” that the Home Office approved the extradition, claiming Julian “did nothing wrong” and “committed no crime.”
“He is a journalist and a publisher and he is being punished for doing his job,” it said.
Any appeal is expected to focus on grounds including the right to freedom of expression and whether the extradition request is politically motivated. Assange is being held at the Belmarsh prison in London after a lengthy battle to avoid extradition.
It all began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published a series of leaks by Chelsea Manning, a former US army soldier, as well as an information dump of more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Some of them contained classified diplomatic analyses from world leaders. The U.S. government then launched a criminal investigation into the massive leak.
There was also in 2010 an arrest warrant for Assange for two separate sexual assault allegations in Sweden.
To avoid extradition to Sweden or to the U.S., Assange hid out in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since August 2012, claiming he could be under political asylum. He left the embassy in 2019 and was arrested in the UK for skipping bail and ultimately was then jailed. The extradition proceedings then began.
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