A London court ruled on Friday, 10 December, that Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange can be extradited to the United States (US) in order to face espionage charges, overturning an earlier judgment from this year, Reuters reported.
In January 2021, a court in the United Kingdom (UK) had ruled that Assange could not be extradited due to his mental health concerns, based on the assumption that Assange would be held in a highly restrictive prison if extradited, and would thereby be suicidal.
The US authorities, however, later assured the court that Assange would not face such repressive prison measures unless absolutely merited.
Assange faces 18 counts of indictment from the US administration, which alleges that he tried to hack into the US military databases and acquire extremely secretive information relating to military operations during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
This information was then published on the WikiLeaks website, also known as the Afghan War Diary and the Iraq War Logs respectively.
Assange maintains that the information he leaked actually exposes human rights violations by the US military.
Prosecutors for the US government argue that classified material that Assange leaked put lives in serious danger, thereby insisting on his extradition.
Assange can be sentenced up to 175 years in jail if he gets convicted in the US, but prosecutors have said that they are seeking a sentence that will put Assange in jail for four to six years, BBC reported.
(With inputs from Reuters and BBC.)
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