(CN) — Six months after a British judge blocked Julian Assange's extradition to face espionage charges in America, the high court agreed Wednesday to let the United States appeal.
Assange, 50, will be detained at London's high-security Belmarsh Prison throughout the appeal process. The Australian-born founder of WikiLeaks has been held at Belmarsh since his arrest in April 2019, which followed a seven-year stint that Assange spent holed up inside Ecuador’s London embassy while fighting a separate legal battle.
Outside the prison on Wednesday, Assange's fiancee, Stella Moris, with whom he has two young children, called for Assange's immediate release Wednesday.
Calling the U.S. case against her partner “the most vicious attack on global press freedom in history,” Moris, who is also a lawyer and a member of Assange’s legal team, urged President Joe Biden to drop the appeal.
“The U.S. government should have accepted the magistrate court’s decision,” she said in a statement. “Instead it keeps this case going.”
Moris said dropping the case would firm up the Biden administration's commitments to respecting free-press rights under the First Amendment.
“Julian is being punished for doing his job as a journalist,” she said.
The U.K. judicial office did not indicate when the appeal would take place before the High Court.
A lower court judge had rejected America’s request to extradite Assange in January, finding there was a “high risk” that detention conditions in the United States would result in the Australian activist killing himself.
Assange, who turned 50 last week, founded WikiLeaks in 2006, enabling anyone to anonymously share classified information. One source, the transgender U.S. Army analyst Chelsea Manning, would later spend seven years in a U.S. military prison for sending millions of State Department cables as well as a disturbing classified video that showed U.S. soldiers in a helicopter firing from above on journalists and Iraqi civilians in 2007.
Manning spent close to another year in prison for refusing to testify after the U.S. charged Assange with 18 counts of soliciting, gathering and publishing classified documents as well as computer hacking related to the release of those files in 2010 and 2011. If convicted of these crimes, he could face 175 years in jail.
Assange’s lawyers have argued that he should be protected from prosecution as a member of the media — an argument the United States contests.
In a new indictment last month, the Justice Department accused Assange of having solicited more classified information and military secrets while trying to recruit hackers at conferences in Europe and Asia.
Assange has spent most of the last decade in seclusion after claiming political asylum when Sweden tried to extradite him to face charges of sexual assault. The Ecuadorean Embassy in London evicted him after seven years, leading to a 2019 sentence for skipping bail and then to his U.S. indictment.
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