WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s battle to avoid extradition to the United States has received a huge boost, with London’s High Court ruling that US assurances over his case are unsatisfactory and he will get a full appeal hearing.
In March, the High Court provisionally gave Assange, 52, permission to appeal on three grounds, but it gave the US the opportunity to provide satisfactory assurances that it would not seek the death penalty and would allow him to seek to rely on a constitutional right to free speech in a trial for spying.
In a short ruling on Monday, two senior judges said the US submissions were not sufficient and said they would allow the appeal to go ahead.
Hundreds of protesters had gathered outside the court before what could have been the culmination of 13 years of legal battles.
Before the hearing, Assange’s legal team warned he could be on a plane across the Atlantic within 24 hours of the decision, but that he could also be released from jail or find himself yet again bogged down in months of legal manoeuvring.
His lawyer Edward Fitzgerald told the judges they should not accept the assurance given by US prosecutors that Assange could seek to rely upon the rights and protections given under the First Amendment because a US court would not be bound by this.
“We say this is a blatantly inadequate assurance,” he told the court.
Fitzgerald accepted a separate assurance the Australian-born Assange would not face the death penalty, saying the US had provided an “unambiguous promise not to charge any capital offence”.
The US had argued its First Amendment assurances were sufficient.
James Lewis, representing the US authorities, said in court documents the assurance “cannot bind the courts”, but the US courts would “take solemn notice and give effect so far as they are able to a promise given by the executive”.
Protesters gathered outside the court, tying yellow ribbons to the iron railings, holding placards and chanting “Free, free Julian Assange”.
In a plea to US President Joe Biden, flags read “#Let him go Joe”.
WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history – along with swathes of diplomatic cables.
In April 2010 it published a classified video showing a 2007 US helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff.
The US authorities want to put Assange on trial on 18 charges, nearly all under the Espionage Act, saying his actions with WikiLeaks were reckless, damaged national security and endangered the lives of agents.
His many global supporters call the prosecution a travesty, an assault on journalism and free speech, and revenge for causing embarrassment.
Calls for the case to be dropped have come from human rights groups, media bodies and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, along with other political leaders.
Assange was first arrested in Britain in 2010 on a Swedish warrant over sex crime allegations that were later dropped.
Since then, he has been variously under house arrest, holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London for seven years and, since 2019, held in the Belmarsh top-security jail, latterly while awaiting a ruling on his extradition.
Before Monday’s ruling, Stella Assange, who married him in Belmarsh in 2022, said that, whatever the outcome, she would continue to fight for his liberty.
with PA