UK secretary signs Assange extradition request

“He’s rightly behind bars because he broke U.K. law,” Javid told BBC Radio 4. “It is a decision ultimately for the courts, but there is a very important part of it for the home secretary and I want to see justice done at all times and we’ve got a legitimate extradition request, so I’ve signed it.”

Assange, 47, had was arrested in April at Ecuador’s embassy in London on a single charge in the U.S. of conspiring to hack into a Pentagon computer network in 2010. This initial indictment revealed that prosecutors charged him with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion by agreeing to help Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning crack a password that would have given Manning access to a classified military network.

Federal prosecutors later accused the WikiLeaks founder of violating the Espionage Act as part of a new superseding indictment in late May, charging him on 17 new counts in addition to the single count unsealed in early April.

The Justice Department said those charges “relate to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.”

The U.S. government alleges that Assange “actively solicited United States classified information, including by publishing a list of ‘Most Wanted Leaks’ that sought, among other things, classified documents” starting in late 2009.

Assange’s attorney, Barry Pollack, said last month: “These unprecedented charges demonstrate the gravity of the threat the criminal prosecution of Julian Assange poses to all journalists in their endeavor to inform the public about actions that have been taken by the U.S. government.”

The extradition treaty between the two nations makes it difficult for the U.S. to charge Assange with more crimes once he is in the U.S., because the agreement says that persons extradited under the treaty can only be tried for crimes “for which extradition was granted” or crimes that are carried out “after the extradition of the person,” though a provision in the treaty does say that the U.K. could potentially waive that provision if the U.S. asks.

Describing Assange as “the public face of WikiLeaks,” the Justice Department said he founded the website as “an intelligence agency of the people.” The superseding indictment also said the information WikiLeaks published “included names of local Afghans and Iraqis who had provided information to U.S. and coalition forces,” which prosecutors alleged “created a grave and imminent risk that the innocent people he named would suffer serious physical harm and/or arbitrary detention.”

The Justice Department said the disclosures from WikiLeaks put journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates, and political dissidents living in repressive regimes and working with the U.S. “at great risk to their own safety.”

Assange has not been charged in connection to his organization’s role in exposing the CIA’s “Vault 7” program back in 2017 nor in connection to its dissemination of hacked emails in relation to the 2016 presidential campaign.

Manning was convicted at a court martial trial in 2013 of leaking a trove of documents to WikiLeaks. Sentenced to 35 years in prison, Manning’s sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama just days before the end of his presidency in January 2017. Manning was recently imprisoned again after refusing to provide grand jury testimony in relation to the WikiLeaks case.

Assange’s possible arrest and extradition to the U.S. had been telegraphed after prosecutors mistakenly revealed in November 2018 that the Justice Department had secretly filed criminal charges against Assange.

Following a U.K. Supreme Court ruling that he should be extradited to Sweden for questioning over sexual assault charges, Assange sought and was granted political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London back in 2012.

Assange could eventually appeal his case to a higher British court and perhaps even to the European Court of Human Rights.