(London) Around 200 to 300 people demonstrated in London on Tuesday to demand that the British government refuse to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is being prosecuted in the United States for a massive leak of confidential documents, a journalist from the AFP.
Posted at 5:01 p.m.
After a long legal standoff with twists and turns, British justice formally gave the green light on April 20 to the surrender of the 50-year-old Australian to American justice, but it goes to British Interior Minister Priti Patel to sign an extradition decree. This can be appealed.
Arguments for Julian Assange’s defense to explain why he should not be extradited were filed on Tuesday, his wife Stella Assange tweeted.
“The political affair, the political persecution of Julian Assange is now formally in the hands of Priti Patel,” said WikiLeaks editor Kristinn Hrafnsson.
According to him, Julian Assange, “deprived of freedom for a decade” is “comforted by the fact that he notices the public and the politicians everywhere rallying to his cause”, “more and more people understand the importance of this case”.
More than twenty human rights and press freedom organizations support him.
For Amaru Narvaez-Reyes, a 25-year-old actor who came to demonstrate, the extradition of Julian Assange “would put fear in the hearts of many journalists and would probably prevent a lot of important information from ending up in the public eye”.
The founder of WikiLeaks is claimed by American justice who wants to judge him for the dissemination, from 2010, of more than 700,000 classified documents on American military and diplomatic activities, in particular in Iraq and Afghanistan. He faces 175 years in prison.
He was arrested in 2019 after spending more than seven years as a refugee in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.