Lawyers for the US government challenged Wednesday, August 11 the reliability of an expert on which the British justice relied to refuse to extradite Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, whom the American justice wants to try for a massive leak of documents .
Read also: The keys to understanding the Assange affair
In January, British judge Vanessa Baraitser rejected the extradition request because of the risk of suicide for the 50-year-old Australian, who faces 175 years in prison in the United States.
Wednesday, during a preliminary hearing in the appeal procedure launched by Washington, lawyer Clair Dobbin, representing the United States, pleaded that the magistrate did
not
"
appreciate the weight
" of the elements produced by an expert which concluded that Julian Assange did not present a risk of suicide.
Instead, she relied on evidence presented by Assange's expert psychiatrist, Michael Kopelman, who admitted to having cheated the courts by "
concealing
" that his client had become a father while he was cloistered in the hospital. Ecuadorian embassy in London, she said.
Revelation of 700,000 classified documents
Julian Assange was arrested by British police in April 2019 after spending seven years in seclusion at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he had taken refuge while on bail.
He feared extradition to the United States or Sweden, where he faced rape charges that have since been dropped.
Read also: Distributed Denial of Secrets, the activist group that takes up the torch of WikiLeaks
The Australian, supported by a number of press freedom organizations, faces 175 years in prison in the United States for having disseminated, from 2010, more than 700,000 classified documents on American military and diplomatic activities, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Dozens of Assange supporters holding "
Ten years is enough!
" Signs
"
Free Assange
" gathered outside the High Court in London on Wednesday, including former Labor opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn.
"
I hope that the Court will send a very clear signal today that it will not allow the appeal of the United States and that Julian Assange can be released,
" said the former Labor leader, denouncing "
the
"
obsession
" of the United States "
with those who uncover the truth about the American military presence in the world
". "
He is a journalist whose only crime was to reveal the dirty and rotten affairs of this world,
" Mario Mantilla, 58, told AFP, wearing a Statue of Liberty costume adorned with fake blood.