The founder of whistleblowing site Wikileaks is facing imprisonment in the US for leaking secret military files between 2010 and 2011. Julian Assange is currently in prison in the UK but could be extradited to the US.
Assange is going to the High Court on February 20 in an attempt to stop the extraditement that could see him face extra prison time.
Here we get into who he is, his personal life, what he is “responsible for leaking” and his extradition risk – which he is set to fight in court tomorrow.
Julian Assange has a long history of using computer programming to gain access to locked files.
Assange, now 52, was fined for hacking offences in 1995 in a court in his native country Australia. But it wasn’t until 2010 when he came to prominence after leaking a series of documents from the US Army intelligence analyst.
Assange worked as editor of his site Wikileaks, before Sweden issued a European arrest warrant in 2010 for questioning in a Swedish investigation. He breached bail and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in 2012.
He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012 on the grounds of political persecution and fears he might be extradited to the United States. Swedish prosecutors dropped their case in 2019.
But in the same year, Assange’s asylum was withdrawn and he was arrested for breaching the Bail Act and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison. Assange has been confined in HM Prison Belmarsh in London since April 2019, as the United States government’s extradition effort is contested in the British courts.
Wikileaks was founded in 2006 and claims to have published more than 10 million private documents relating to war, spying and corruption.
In 2010, it released a video that showed civilians killed from a US military helicopter in the Iraqi capital Baghdad. It also published documents suggesting the US military had killed hundreds of civilians during the war in Afghanistan.
Wikileaks posted its first leak in December 2006, with its most recent publication being in 2021.
Assange’s wife Stella Moris has continued supporting him from afar. In a recent interview, she demanded he was “innocent” and has been “left to rot in jail”. She said: “Four years (in prison) is a long time especially when you don’t know how long it will go on for.”
“Personally, his physical condition is deteriorating by the day and as one can imagine he has been in a single cell since 11th April 2019 and he is in his cell most of the time.
He spends maybe two or three hours outside of that cell. He eats alone in his cell, not of his choosing everyone does that, it is how Belmarsh functions.”
The couple have been married since 2022, with his previous marriage to Teresa Assange ending in 1999. Assange has a 34-year-old son called Daniel in Australia, and sons Gabriel, six, and Max, four, with his once-secret wife Stella Moris Assange.
In 2019, the US extradition request was granted but Assange has since spent several years trying to overturn the decision.
Assange remains in London’s high security Belmarsh prison where he will be kept while the extradition case proceeds.
In 2021, the High Court ruled that he should be extradited, with the Supreme Court upholding that decision in 2022 and then-Home Secretary, Priti Patel, confirming the extradition order.
Assange is back in the High Court on 20 and 21 February 2024 seeking permission to review Ms Patel’s decision and to try to challenge the original 2021 court ruling. He has cited mental health concerns as one of the reasons he should not be extradited.
