The U.S. case crumbles upon close examination. From Cathy Vogan at consortiumnews.com:
Lawyers for the WikiLeaks publisher charge that while British courts looked the other way, the U. S. has been distorting and withholding evidence to engineer his extradition, Cathy Vogan reports.
Don’t Extradite Assange March, central London, Feb. 22, 2020. (Steve Eason, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
A clue to some of the legal arguments Julian Assange’s lawyers will likely make at a two-day hearing this week at the High Court in London is contained in a 150-page submission that a judge rejected last June.
Justice Jonathan Swift’s three-page ruling to deny Assange’s application to appeal is what the imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher wants reversed at the hearing beginning Tuesday at the Royal Courts of Justice.
If he is again denied leave to appeal, this time by two judges, Assange could theoretically be put on a plane to the United States as early as Wednesday night. But the decision could be delayed for months.
Assange initially won his case in the magistrate’s court in January 2021, where extradition was blocked on health grounds and the dangerous conditions in U.S. prisons. But the U.S. won on appeal in October 2021 when it belatedly issued “assurances” that it would not mistreat Assange in the U.S.
That led to the British home secretary’s decision in 2022 to extradite Assange to the United States, which Assange’s team seeks to appeal.
