In front of the British justice which examines their request for extradition of Julian Assange, the United States disputed Wednesday the risk of suicide and sought to be reassured on the treatment which would be reserved to the founder of WikiLeaks if it was handed over to them.
Prosecuted for a massive leak of classified American documents, the 50-year-old Australian faces 175 years in prison in the United States, in a case described as a dangerous attack on press freedom by those who support him.
In a hearing scheduled to end on Thursday, the United States hopes to convince the High Court in London to overturn the decision rendered last January by Vanessa Baraitser. The magistrate had rejected their extradition request, arguing that the man risked suicide if he were to be incarcerated in an American prison.
On the first day of the proceedings, the lawyer representing the American government, James Lewis, assured that Julian Assange had “no history of serious and lasting mental illness”, saying that even the experts appointed by his defense found him only “moderately depressed. “.
He claimed the Australian had “every reason to exaggerate his symptoms” and warned the court against a ruling based on predictions made in a “crystal ball” regarding his fate in the event of extradition.
The lawyer insisted on the assurances given by Washington: on the one hand, Julian Assange would receive the necessary psychological care, on the other hand, he would neither be subjected to special measures, nor detained in the dreaded prison of very high security. ADX Florence, Colorado, nicknamed the “Alcatraz of the Rockies”.
Julian Assange’s defense countered that these assurances did not prevent him from being held in a comparable facility and reiterated that the United States had no “reliable basis” to reverse the extradition denial.
Detained for two and a half years at Belmarsh high security prison, east of the British capital, after his long voluntary imprisonment at the Ecuadorian embassy, Julian Assange participated in the hearing from a distance, by videoconferencing.
Julian Assange is facing prosecution during Donald Trump’s presidency. Under his predecessor Barack Obama, of which Joe Biden was the vice-president, American justice had given up on prosecuting the founder of WikiLeaks.
He is being prosecuted for having circulated, from 2010, more than 700,000 classified documents on American military and diplomatic activities that took place in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He was arrested by British police in April 2019 after spending seven years at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he had taken refuge while on bail. He feared extradition to the United States or Sweden, where he has been the subject of charges for rape, since dropped.
” Very thin “
The stake is to know if the British justice “will extradite a journalist to the country which plotted to assassinate him”, estimated before the hearing Stella Moris, the companion of Julian Assange, “very worried” after having it. seen “very skinny” in prison on Saturday.
“I hope the court will put an end to this nightmare,” she said in the presence of several dozen supporters of the Australian gathered in front of the courthouse.
“He did nothing wrong from a legal, ethical or moral point of view,” said Sadia Koknie, a 40-year-old protester interviewed by AFP. “He was held in appalling conditions. […] He shouldn’t be there. “
British justice agreed to examine the American appeal in particular because the reliability of an expert who had testified in favor of Assange has been questioned. The psychiatrist Michael Kopelman had indeed admitted to having deceived justice by “concealing” the fact that his client had become a father of two children while he was confined to the Embassy of Ecuador.
He did nothing legally, ethically or morally wrong
After the two days of hearing, the decision will be reserved for several weeks.
This appeal constitutes one of the last recourse for Washington, which, in the event of a new defeat, would have no other possibility than to seize the British Supreme Court, without guarantee that this one accepts. If the United States were to succeed, the case would still be far from over: it would then be sent back to a court to decide again.