Any journalist who receives classified information about the United States, or is contacted by an informant to expose crimes or irregularities, will now fear extradition and risk spending the rest of his life in jail, said the secretary general of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), Michelle Stanistreet, in her statement.
The British Minister of the Interior, Priti Patel, approved the day before that the Australian journalist be handed over to the United States, which intends to try him for exposing on WikiLeaks war crimes committed by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan and thousands of secret files of US diplomacy.
If found guilty by a US court, Assange could be sentenced to 175 years in prison from the 17 charges against him for alleged violations of the espionage law of that country.
The general secretary of the NUJ recalled, however, that the founder of WikiLeaks is persecuted for actions that are part of the daily work of an investigative journalist.
Priti Patel had the opportunity to show humanity and respect freedom of expression, and I regret that she chose not to, added Stanistreet, who recalled that there are still some legal avenues to try to prevent Assange’s extradition.
The final decision on the fate of the 51-year-old journalist was left in the hands of the British Home Secretary after a higher court accepted an appeal by US prosecutors last April, and overturned the verdict of a trial judge who opposed extradite him after hearing medical arguments about the cyberactivist’s fragile mental health.
Assange, who has been held in a British maximum-security prison since his arrest at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in April 2019, has 14 days to appeal the extradition order signed by Patel.
Speaking the day before to foreign correspondents in this capital, the defense team of the WikiLeaks founder and his wife, Stella Assange, promised to exhaust all legal avenues to try to prevent him from being handed over to US justice.
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