(ANSA) - LONDON, OCTOBER 25 - The mobilization of activists committed to human rights and freedom of the press has resumed in the United Kingdom on the eve of the British appeals trial intended to decide on the appeal presented by the Washington justice to obtain extradition to the States United by Julian Assange, co-founder of Wikileaks, after the first instance sentence that denied it last January.
Over the weekend, several hundred people paraded through the streets of London - from the BBC headquarters to AltaCorte, where the two-day crucial hearings on the fate of the Australian activist, relentlessly pursued by the US ever since Wikileaks spread a mountain of documents, will begin on Wednesday. embarrassing Americans, including on war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Assange is accused in the US of violation of the Espionage Act, a highly contested charge by human rights defenders and never before raised for a case of journalistic publication of secret files, as well as complicity in computer piracy.
Overseas the author of Wikileaks, who for over two years has been detained in the London maximum security prison of Belmarshpur, no longer having any pending with the justice of the Kingdom, after 7 years as a refugee in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, risks a sentence monstre to 175 years of jail. Sentence that according to an expert opinion accepted by the British first instance court would expose him to the risk of suicide.
Assange's legal team has always rejected the accusations, considered a threat to press freedom and the result of political revenge.
All the more so according to the latest revelations that emerged in September according to which the CIA, during the Trump administration, in 2017, had studied a plan to kidnap and possibly assassinate Assange during his stay in the Ecuadorian diplomatic headquarters.
In January a London court had denied extradition to protect his "mental health".
In the summer, however, the US managed to question the reliability of the appraisal received in the first instance, obtaining the go-ahead for the appeal.
(HANDLE).