British judge rejects U.S. request to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been a thorn in the side of U.S. prosecutors and politicians who for years have made every effort to put him on trial for publishing hundreds of thousands of pages of military secrets. But now a British judge has thrown their cause into disarray by blocking Mr. Assange’s extradition to the United States to face a host of criminal charges, including espionage.

What’s even more confounding for U.S. officials, though, is that District Justice Vanessa Baraitser agreed with every legal argument for Mr. Assange’s extradition but refused to hand him over on humanitarian grounds.

The judge ruled Monday that, if convicted, Mr. Assange would be imprisoned in a supermaximum facility in Florence, Colo., called ADX Florence, where isolation is extreme and mental-health services are limited.

“Mr. Assange faces the bleak prospect of severely restrictive detention conditions designed to remove physical contact and reduce social interaction and contact with the outside world to a bare minimum,” she said in her ruling. “He faces these prospects as someone with a diagnosis of clinical depression and persistent thoughts of suicide.”

In a blunt rebuke of the prison, she concluded: “The mental condition of Mr. Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America.”

The decision was a stunning blow to U.S. prosecutors who first charged Mr. Assange in 2017 with computer hacking. They added 17 violations of the Espionage Act to the indictment in 2019, invoking a 103-year-old law that prohibits anyone from unlawfully obtaining and publishing information relating to national defence.

All of the charges related to the publication by WikiLeaks of more than 250,000 secret military cables, reports and briefing notes in 2010 and 2011.

The material exposed atrocities by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq and led to an outcry over American foreign policy. Mr. Assange and his supporters have argued that he acted like any other journalist and that the leaks served the public interest. And they’ve said the case against him has become so politicized that he cannot get a fair trial in the U.S.

Mr. Assange, 49, has long feared facing criminal charges in the U.S. In 2012, he sought refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London after a British court upheld his extradition to Sweden to stand trial for sexual assault. He denied the Swedish charges but felt certain the Swedes would turn him over to U.S. prosecutors. He was forced out of the embassy in 2019 when Ecuador said he violated the conditions of asylum. London police arrested him for skipping bail and, although the Swedish case was later dropped, Mr. Assange was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison by a British judge for the bail violation. He has remained in jail throughout the extradition process.

Lawyers for the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) have always insisted that the case against Mr. Assange has nothing to do with freedom of the press. They argue the charges focus on his conduct in helping former U.S. Army intelligence officer Chelsea Manning hack into government computers to steal the secret military documents. Ms. Manning received a 35-year sentence in 2013 for violating the Espionage Act, but the jail term was commuted by president Barack Obama just before he left office in 2017.

The DoJ has also said Mr. Assange exposed the identities of more than 100 government sources, something other media outlets did not do because it would put the informants’ lives in danger.

Justice Baraitser upheld almost every DoJ argument and ruled that the U.S. had largely met the requirements for extradition. She agreed that the U.S. charges were not about press freedom and said “Mr. Assange, it is alleged, was not concerned with the gathering of information, but … complicit in unlawfully taking it.”

She also rejected claims that the case against Mr. Assange was politically motivated and that he would not get a fair trial in the U.S.

However, she said, British law prevents extradition if it is “unjust or oppressive by reason of a person’s health.”

She noted that if Mr. Assange were extradited, he would be held according to “special administrative measures,” or SAMs, which apply in cases involving national security. Only nine people convicted of espionage in the U.S. have been subject to SAMs, the judge said.

If convicted, she added, Mr. Assange would serve his sentence in ADX Florence, a high-security prison where SAMs prisoners are allowed a limited number of phone calls and visitors and are not permitted to interact with other inmates. The prison houses several notorious criminals, including Terry Nichols, who conspired with Timothy McVeigh to blow up a government building in Oklahoma City in 1995, and former FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who sold secrets to Russia.

Justice Baraitser said Mr. Assange has Asperger’s syndrome and suffers from depression, hallucinations and suicidal thoughts. “I am satisfied that, in these harsh conditions, Mr. Assange’s mental health would deteriorate, causing him to commit suicide with the ‘single-minded determination’ of his autism spectrum disorder,” she ruled.

Lawyers representing the DoJ have indicated they will appeal the ruling, which could take years. “While we are extremely disappointed in the court’s ultimate decision, we are gratified that the United States prevailed on every point of law raised,” DoJ spokesman Marc Raimondi said.

Justice Baraitser will hold a hearing Wednesday to determine if Mr. Assange should be released on bail pending the appeal.

While Mr. Assange looked on passively from the back of the courtroom as the judge read out a summary of her ruling Monday, his family and supporters celebrated outside.

“Today’s victory is the first step towards justice in this case,” said his partner, Stella Moris.

Mr. Assange’s mother, Christine Assange, called on president-elect Joe Biden to end the prosecution of her son. “The decade-long process was the punishment,” she said. “He has suffered enough.”

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