LONDON (Reuters) – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is fighting for extradition to the United States from Britain, failed Monday to retain additional hearings that resumed after a months-long interruption caused by the coronavirus blockade.
The U.S. government accuses Assange, 49, of Australian descent, of conspiring to hack computers and violate an espionage law in connection with the publication of confidential cables through WikiLeaks in 2010-2011.
Assange, who shaved and wore a suit at Monday’s hearing, officially refused to be extradited. A new, broader replacement charge issued by the U.S. government in June includes 18 alleged conspiracy offenses to hack into government computers and espionage.
The opinion on rejected his lawyers’ request to postpone the case until January to give them more time for new U.S. positions.
“We are simply not in a position to gather evidence and respond to the case that has arisen in recent weeks,” Assange’s lawyer Mark Summers said.
Assange is seen through his admirers as a free speech champion who opposed the abuse of force across the United States.His critics say that losing un redacted documents recklessly endangered the lives of intelligence sources.
Assange made headlines abroad in 2010 when WikiLeaks released a U.S. Army video featuring a 2007 attack via Apache helicopters in Baghdad that killed a dozen people, adding two reuters news crew members.He then published vast treasures of U.S. army documents and diplomatic cables.
More recently, he published stolen documents from the Democratic National Committee during the US presidential election campaign.But it’s not the first time From 2016.Assange denies the allegations through U.S. investigators that he received documents from Russian hackers, although the matter is not part of the court proceedings.
Extradition hearings began in February, but then were postponed a few months before much more was delayed due to a national shutdown to curb the spread of COVID-19.
Assange’s lawyers say he would have a fair trial in america for political reasons.
In court documents, they wrote that Assange’s prosecution component of President Donald Trump’s “effective declaration of war against fugitives and journalists.”
The first witness, Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, told the Old Bailey in London that no publisher had been effectively prosecuted in the United States for publishing leaked confidential documents.
Assange’s legal difficulties in Britain date back to 2010, when he began fighting to extradite him to Sweden to answer questions about allegations of sexual assault, which have since been dropped.
In June 2012 he took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador.He spent seven years locked up there, fathering two children.
After Ecuador revoked his asylum, he was dragged out of the embassy in April 2019 and served a brief British criminal sentence for violating the conditions of bail, and remains in a criminal position pending the final results of the US extradition application.
Edited through Peter Graff
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