Assange 'too ill' to appear at final London plea hearing, court told
London: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is too unwell to appear at a two-day hearing to fight his extradition to the US on a video link from prison, a court has heard.
England’s High Court will consider whether Australian-born Assange, who has been held in Belmarsh prison for almost five years, can be granted leave to appeal against an extradition decision made in 2022 by the then UK Home Secretary, Priti Patel.
Demonstrators hold banners outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will make his final appeal against his impending extradition to the United States at the court.Credit: AP
Ed Fitzgerald KC, acting for Assange, told Judge Dame Victoria Sharp and Justice Johnson, his client was not well on Tuesday and therefore unable to attend the hearing at all.
The barrister told the court that Assange was being subject to an “unjustified interference in freedom of speech”. “The applicant is being prosecuted for political offences,” he said.
“The prosecution is politically motivated. Mr Assange was exposing serious criminality. He is being prosecuted for undertaking the ordinary journalist practice of obtaining and publishing classified information that is both true and of public interest.”
Fitzgerald said he also wanted to argue in an appeal that Assange had been subject to a CIA plot to assassinate him while he was holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
Julian Assange in 2017.Credit: AP
He said the allegation involved “specific evidence”, but has not been properly examined by British judges.
“There is a real risk of further extrajudicial actions against him by the CIA or other agencies,” Fitzgerald said.
Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Royal Courts of Justice earlier tying golden ribbons with the words “Free Julian Assange now!” to the main fence as well as the surrounding gates and trees.
Several were waving Australian flags, holding placards with the words “Free Julian Assange” and “drop the charges”, and chanting: “There is only one decision – no extradition,” and, “US, UK, hands off Assange.”
Assange, 52, faces what could be his final court hearing in London starting on Tuesday as he tries to stop his extradition to the US on charges relating to the 2010 disclosure of a huge cache of classified government documents.
He is accused of conspiring with the US army whistleblower Chelsea Manning to hack into a Pentagon computer and of releasing 90,000 reports relating to the war in Afghanistan, 400,000 relating to the Iraq war and 250,000 US diplomatic cables.
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His lawyers say that if he is convicted of the US charges Assange could receive a prison term of up to 175 years.
At the rally his wife, Stella Assange, stopped and spoke to the crowd. “There is no possibility of a fair trial if he is extradited to the US,” she said. “He would never be safe.”
She said the case against her husband was an “admission by the US they now criminalise investigative journalism”.
“It is an attack on the truth and the public’s right to know,” she said, adding she believed what had happened to Alexei Navalny in recent days “can happen to Julian”.
Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, said his sibling was going through an “immense amount of suffering” while being held in prison and said his health was “deteriorating”.
“He’s suffering in there. He’s going through immense amount of suffering. He’s deteriorating, his health is in a very delicate position,” Shipton said before the hearing.
In a January 2021 ruling, then-district judge Vanessa Baraitser said that Assange should not be extradited, but authorities in the US subsequently brought a successful challenge against this decision.
Assange has been held at London’s Belmarsh jail since April 2019 when he was sentenced for skipping bail conditions. He had previously spent seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy after breaking bail in 2012 when he was due to be extradited to Sweden on unrelated sexual assault charges, which were subsequently dropped. He was arrested and forcibly removed from the Ecuadorean embassy by British police in 2019.
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