A court in London, has allowed the UK to extradite the founder of the whistle-blower organisation WikiLeaks to be tried in the US, where he faces a potentially long prison sentence over leaking US state secrets, British news portal The Guardian reports.
The ruling of the High Court of Justice in England announced on Friday, February 10, deals a major blow to the WikiLeaks co-founder’s efforts to prevent his extradition to the US to face espionage charges, although his fiancée immediately stated that an appeal would be launched.
Read also: Assange cannot be extradited to US, British judge decides
The leading judges found that a then-district judge had based her decision earlier this year on the risk of Assange being held in highly restrictive prison conditions if extradited. However, in their ruling on Friday, they sided with the US authorities after a near-unprecedented package of assurances were put forward that Assange would not face those strictest measures either pre-trial or post-conviction unless he committed an act in the future that required them.
The court case against the 49-year-old relates to WikiLeaks’s publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as diplomatic cables, in 2010 and 2011, The Guardian reports.
British court permits extraditing of WikiLeaks Assange to US
