By Adela Suliman - NBC News
LONDON - British judge Vanessa Baraitser denied WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange parole on Wednesday, considering he poses a flight risk, despite having previously rejected his extradition to the United States on health grounds.
The resolution comes two days after the magistrate rejected Assange's extradition to the United States, claiming that he poses a risk of suicide and could take his life if he is prosecuted in the United States. The American justice accuses him of 18 crimes of espionage and computer intrusion, punished in the country with up to 175 years in prison.
At Westminster Magistrates Court, located in central London, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser argued that
Assange is at flight risk and will remain incarcerated in a prison in the English capital
until the decision is made on the appeal of the Justice Department of United States on his extradition.
"As far as Mr Assange is concerned, this case has not yet been won,"
recalled Judge Baraitser, who noted that the 49-year-old Australian inmate had incentives to "run away", had violated bail in the past and demonstrated his willingness to "disobey the orders" of that court.
[Chelsea Manning, Former Army Intelligence Analyst, Will Be Released From Jail By Judge's Decision]
WikiLeaks, the organization that publishes anonymous reports and leaked documents through its website, published hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables from the United States that exposed often critical assessments of world leaders, including the Saudi royals and the Russian president. Vladimir Putin.
Among the files they released in 2010 was video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by US forces in Baghdad, which
killed a dozen people, including two journalists from the Reuters news agency
.
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Assange has not been in a public place since he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 because of extradition fears from the United States.
He also tried to avoid extradition to Sweden on allegations of sex crimes, which were later dropped in 2015.
[Trump commutes the sentence of his former adviser Roger Stone days before his date of entry into jail]
Assange has been in a London prison since his expulsion from the embassy in April 2019.
Supporters hail Assange as an anti-establishment hero, scapegoat for exposing US abuses of power in Afghanistan and Iraq, and see his prosecution as an attack on journalism and free speech.
Supporters of Julian Assange celebrate in London the ruling of the magistrate rejecting his extradition to the United States, Monday, January 4, 2021.AP Photo / Frank Augstein
But detractors see him as a dangerous figure who has undermined security in the West and deny that he is a journalist.
District Judge Vanessa Baraitser explained in her ruling Monday that the WikiLeaks founder's activity in 2010,
which received hundreds of thousands of classified files from U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning
, went beyond the journalism of investigation.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador declared at a press conference on Monday that he would offer Assange political asylum.
A day later Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison told a Sydney 2GB radio station that Assange was "free to return home" to Australia, once he had put an end to his legal troubles.
