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JULIAN ASSANGE’S life is at risk should his final appeal against his extradition to the US fail, his lawyer has said.
The 52-year-old WikiLeaks founder, who exposed war crimes committed by the US in the Afghan and Iraq wars, faces up to 175 years in a “political prosecution” in the US.
His lawyer Jennifer Robinson, who is an international human rights lawyer, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: “As a result of the 13 years he’s been effectively in prison or under house arrest or some form of restrictions on his liberty inside the Ecuadorian embassy he is really unwell.
“Because of the treatment he has suffered, he suffers a major depressive illness, he has been diagnosed as being on the spectrum, and the medical evidence is if he was extradited to the United States those conditions would cause him to commit suicide.
“So his life is at risk and I am not exaggerating that.”
Mr Assange faces 18 charges in the US over WikiLeaks’s publication of hundreds of thousands of classified documents leaked by former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.
His final appeal against extradition will be heard in the High Court in a two-day hearing starting on February 20.
The hearing will determine whether Mr Assange has exhausted his opportunities to appeal against his extradition before a British court, though an application before the European Court of Human Rights remains a possibility.
The father-of-two has suffered from deteriorating physical and mental health while being held in Belmarsh, the maximum-security prison in south-east London, following his removal from the Ecuadorian embassy, where he had sought sanctuary for seven years, in 2019.
In a January 2021 ruling, then-district judge Vanessa Baraitser said he should not be sent to the US, citing a real and “oppressive” risk of suicide, while ruling against the 51-year-old on all other issues.
But US authorities subsequently brought a successful High Court challenge against this decision, paving the way for his extradition.
In June last year, he lost his appeal against a judge’s ruling over whether he should be extradited.
Mr Assange’s wife Stella has said that the stakes are “high on all sides, not just for Julian’s life and his freedom, but all the press freedoms and the freedom of speech rights that go with him.”
