A high court in London on Wednesday upheld an earlier verdict by a lower court to extradite Julian Assange, founder and head of the whistle-blower website, WikiLeaks, to Sweden for facing a charge of rape and another for sexual assault on two women. Assange has a fortnight to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Assange and his lawyers argued the extradition warrant had been issued by a prosecutor and not a court and was not legally valid. The two judges at the Royal Court of Justice in London, however, upheld the earlier verdict from a magistrate’s court in February that had decided in favour of extraditing Assange under a European arrest warrant.
Appearing outside the court after the judgment this morning, Assange made a brief statement, stating his legal team would discuss a course of action to take the battle to the Supreme Court. He said updates and facts of the case were available at https://bsmedia.business-standard.comwww.swedenversusassange.com. Live tweets from the court were also fed into Twitter website under the hash-tag swedenvsassange.
A further appeal by Assange will not be an automatic or unconditional option. The Supreme Court will have to be convinced there is a legal basis for challenging the HC’s verdict.
Assange and his supporters have maintained their position that the alleged charges are politically motivated. He has been under strict curfew and house arrest in Britain for the last 330 days.
Assange and his small team of computer specialists had over the past five years managed to leak several thousand sensitive diplomatic cables that been a source of embarrassment to governments around the world, especially that of America. A US soldier, Bradely Manning, is under arrest in a military prison in the US since May 2010 for allegedly leaking these to Assange.
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In March this year, The Hindu newspaper in India announced it had struck a deal with WikiLeaks to publish India-related diplomatic cables.
On March 15, an editorial in The Hindu said, “Politicians of all shades, diplomats and other officials, sleuths, businessmen, journalists, busybodies, bigwigs and smallwigs figure in the WikiLeaks India Cache – which comprises 5,100 US Embassy and consulate cables relevant to India (not all of them originating in India) and aggregates an astonishing six million words.”
Last week, WikiLeaks said it would be suspending operations temporarily, due to financial difficulties. Assange and his supporters have charged Mastercard, Visa and many other financial institutions of colluding with powerful governments around the world in blocking donations coming into WikiLeaks’ coffers.