• Live
    • Audio Only
  • google plus
  • facebook
  • twitter
News > United Kingdom

Assange’s Defense: No Guarantees of Fair Trial in the US

  • Supporters of Julian Assange on Friday vowed to fight his extradition to the US after Great Britain approved a request for the WikiLeaks founder to face trial there over the publication of secret military files.

    Supporters of Julian Assange on Friday vowed to fight his extradition to the US after Great Britain approved a request for the WikiLeaks founder to face trial there over the publication of secret military files. | Photo: Twitter @News24

Published 18 June 2022
Opinion

The defense of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange says there are no guarantees that the U.S. justice system will abide by principles of due process in his case.
 


The spokesman for Assange's legal team in Ecuador, lawyer Carlos Poveda, has cast doubt this Friday that the U.S. justice system will abide by due process in the case of Julian Assange if he is tried in this country.

RELATED:

British Home Secretary Approves Assange's US Extradition

"There are already precedents in which the U.S. has not respected the guarantees and its commitments," he remarked.

Poveda has affirmed that the decision of the British government to authorize the extradition of the Australian "is not a final decision", stressing that Assange's defense team will file an appeal before the High Court of London, in case of an unfavorable sentence.

"There still are two instances in the English judicial system to appeal to, but we must not lose sight of the fact that some kind of provisional or precautionary measure could be activated before the European Court of Human Rights," he explained.

Poveda recalled the promise made by the United Kingdom to Assange that he would not be extradited to a country that has the death penalty, assuring that his refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London (British capital) "was a strategy of Great Britain, the United States and Ecuador".

Assange was handed over to the UK Police by the Ecuadorian government in April 2019, and since then he has been confined at Belmarsh high-security prison, awaiting the conclusion of the extradition process, initiated by the American justice system.

If extradited to the United States, the Wikileaks founder could be sentenced to 175 years in prison from 17 charges related to the Espionage Act.

Washington accuses the cyber-activist of an alleged crime of "conspiracy to commit computer intrusion" and 17 other charges for accessing, obtaining and disclosing secret military and diplomatic documents related to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Guantánamo prisoners and diplomatic cables released by the digital platform Wikileaks.

Comment
0
Comments
Post with no comments.