The London court on Monday begins a hearing on the extradition of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the United States, where he faces up to 175 years in prison.
Assange is currently serving a sentence in Britain for violating bail conditions.
It is about the events of 2012. Assange was then accused in Sweden of sexual harassment, and Britain had to decide on his extradition. Assange, released on bail, did not appear in court and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London, where he spent seven years. The Swedish authorities later closed the case.
In April 2019, the founder of Wikileaks was found guilty of failure to appear in court in 2012 at the Westminster Magistrate Court.
Then the authorities of Ecuador allowed the British police to go to the embassy and arrest the founder of Wikileaks. In early May 2019, a court in the UK sent Julian Assange to jail for 50 weeks.
In April last year, the US Department of Justice announced that it accuses the founder of WikiLeaks of conspiring with former Wikileaks informant Chelsea Manning to break into networks of government computers.
Later, US judicial authorities announced a decision to file additional charges against the founder of Wikileaks on 17 more points. All charges, as noted by the American media, are related to the illegal receipt and publication of data related to US defense.
In particular, in 2016, during the election campaign, Assange published documents relating to the National Committee of the US Democratic Party and undermining the authority of the then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
The Democratic Party is convinced that the hacking of the servers of its National Committee had a significant impact on the course of the struggle for the presidency in 2016. US intelligence agencies accuse Russia of hacking.
Assange himself stated that Russia was not involved in the “hacker hack” and was not a Wikileaks informant.
Prior to this, WikiLeaks has already published materials related to the US presidential election. The data concerned Hillary Clinton’s support from the Democratic National Committee to the detriment of another Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders. The publication had a wide resonance.
In general, Assange in the United States faces a punishment of 18 counts.
For each of the points Assange faces 10 years in prison. And taking into account the charges put forward earlier, Assange in the worst case for him can be sentenced, in total, to 175 years in prison.
Assange’s father, John Shipton, in turn, said that the extradition of his son to the United States would be “death penalty” for Assange.
“The ongoing anxiety that Julian has been experiencing for 10 years has a very harmful effect,” Shipton said on the air of the BBC television and radio corporation.
“I can’t make assumptions about his state of mind, but I can imagine that he will be very concerned, since extradition to the US is the death penalty,” added Father Assange.
At the end of last year, British media reported that more than 60 doctors from around the world expressed serious concern about the health status of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Experts pointed out that Assange could die in prison before the trial due to physiological and psychological problems if he was not provided with urgent medical care.