Today, the trial will resume in the UK if Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is to be extradited to the US. Assange has been charged with, among other things, espionage in the United States and risks a total of 175 years in prison if he is convicted in a US court.
The British trial, which began in February, will last four weeks, but it will take several years before it is known whether Assange will actually be extradited or not.
It is in the classic Old Bailey courthouse in central London, a court dating back several hundred years, that Assange’s fate, at least in the first British instance, is now to be decided.
And the question of whether or not Assange should be extradited must be seen as one of the globally most noticed and charged cases the court has ever had.
The 49-year-old Australian Citizen Julian Assange has been charged in the United States on 18 counts under the country’s spy laws and also for unlawful hacking.
Not least because he had Wikileaks publish classified American military material via Wikileaks, including a video showing how the US military shot down civilians during the Iraq war.
The United States therefore wants him extradited from Britain.
The Assange side, for its part, claims that the prosecution against Assange in the United States is politically motivated and that extradition should therefore not take place. The Wikleaks founder’s lawyers also believe that Assange’s health condition is too bad for an extradition, this spring they claimed, among other things, that there was a risk of suicide if Assange was extradited.
They demand that Assange be released.
But whatever it is now in the first instance both sides are expected to appeal the verdict.
“It will take at least two to three years, probably longer than that, given the various appeal processes before the matter is decided,” one of Assange’s legal representatives, lawyer Jennifer Robinson, told Ekot earlier this year.
In the coming weeks, both sides will invoke a number of witnesses and experts, and Assange is expected to testify in court himself.
Assange took refuge to Ecuador’s embassy in London in 2012 to avoid being extradited to Sweden where he was then suspected of sex crimes.
When Ecuador, last year, no longer wanted to house Assange, he was arrested by British police and has since been imprisoned in the east of London pending a decision on extradition.