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This week lawyers for the U.S. government began a legal challenge to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the U.K. to face charges of violating the Espionage Act.
Assange is wanted in the U.S. on 18 criminal charges after WikiLeaks published thousands of secret U.S. military and diplomatic documents concerning the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in 2010.
In a two-day hearing in the British High Court, the U.S. government appealed a Jan. 4 ruling by a London district judge declining to extradite Assange to the U.S. largely due to the risk he would take his own life in a maximum security prison.
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Key recent developments—including new assurances about how Assange would be treated by the U.S.—were brought before a British judge tasked with reviewing the lower court’s ruling and considering whether the risk to Assange’s safety had changed.
Here’s what you need to know about the appeal and the story so far:
Who is Julian Assange and what is his website, WikiLeaks?
Australian cyber activist Assange launched WikiLeaks in 2006. The non-profit was set up with the aim of exposing state secrets its founder argued should be in the public domain. In 2010, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning provided WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of highly classified internal documents.
The publications included revelation of what appeared to be war crimes. Footage released in April 2010 showed U.S. soldiers shooting and killing civilians from a helicopter in Iraq. It also included sensitive information about human intelligence sources and surveillance techniques, disclosure of which the U.S. argues put lives at risk.
Later that year, in November 2010, Swedish authorities issued an arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of rape and other sexual offences. Assange was working in London at the time, and claimed the charges were fabricated in order to facilitate his extradition from Sweden to the U.S. for publishing the sensitive…
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Source : time
