Hard setback for the Australian journalist Julian Assange and for their chances of not being extradited to the United States, whose Government persists in its request for his extradition to be tried on 17 charges related to the Espionage Law and computer piracy; accusations that could lead to founder of ‘WikiLeaks’ 175 years of sentence. At the hearing on August 11, Judge Timothy Holroyde of the High Court of Justice of London, questioned the decision of his counterpart Vanessa Baraitser to refuse extradition to safeguard Assange’s mental health and before the suicide risk if he is finally convicted in the United States, where, according to the judge, his entry into a prison would be a hard “confinement”.
At this time, hethe only asset of the defense of Julian Assange, imprisoned in the United Kingdom since April 2019, when he was arrested in an attack on the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had been a refugee for seven years, It is his deteriorating mental health and the risk of suicide that his delivery to the United States would entail. A forensic report from psiquiatra Michael Kopelman This is the proof. Judge Braitser relied on that expert report to deny the extradition request on January 4.
The most worrying thing about Assange’s procedural situation is that the British judge did not endorse the main thesis of her defense, coordinated by the Spanish lawyer and former judge Baltasar Garzón. Baraitser refused the political motivation denounced by the founder of ‘Wikileaks’ regarding his persecution as a journalist by the US Government In 2010, the Julian Assange website published hundreds of US State Department cables demonstrating the violation of human rights in Guantanamo Bay and during the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks. In the secret documents revealed by ‘Wikileaks’, the abuse of the US military in terms of civilian deaths was evident.
Following Judge Braitser’s sentencing, another judge denied Washington the possibility of using arguments contrary to the psychiatric report that warns of the danger of suicide in its appeal. According to the US Administration, the Kopelman Professor of Psychiatry tried to mislead the court by pointing as “high and true” the possibility that Assange would take his life if he were to be extradited to the United States.
In the view of last August 11, a third judge has allowed the United States to challenge that psychiatric opinion in its challenge against non-extradition. Likewise, Judge Timothy Holroyde reproaches Judge Braitser for having overestimated the risk of suicide; it also questions the fragility of the journalist’s mental health. At the final hearing to decide the extradition, to be held in London next October, the Dr. Kopelman’s report will be the lynchpin.
The credibility of the report has been harshly questioned by US prosecutors, after revealing that the psychiatrist intentionally omitted that Assange had two sons with his lawyer, Stella Morris, while he was taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Julian Assange, who is on remand in London’s Belmarsh Prison, has endured a real ordeal for a decade, without having yet been convicted of the crimes he was charged with since he released the secret US military documents. He was accused of sexual abuse in Sweden, but the Prosecutor’s Office of the Nordic country finally closed the case due to the evidentiary difficulty. In the UK, he was sentenced to fifty weeks in prison for violating probation conditions in 2012, when he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. There he remained for almost seven years, protected as a political asylee.
However, the successor of Rafael Correa in the presidency of Ecuador, Lenin Moreno, withdrew Assange’s diplomatic protection and in April 2019 allowed the London Metropolitan Police to assault the Ecuadorian embassy, which ended with the journalist’s arrest. Not only the health and life of Julian Assange is at stake, but also the freedom of the press.
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