How Julian Assange, the Wikileaks co-founder, has spent last 13 years since arrest

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is all set to launch what could be his last chance to stop his extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States on Tuesday after more than 13 years of battling the authorities in the English courts.

The development comes as US prosecutors seek to put the 52-year-old on trial on 18 counts, including one under the Espionage Act.

Here’s all we know about him and the matter:

About Julian Assange

Assange was born in Townsville, Australia, in July 1971, to parents who were involved in theatre and travelled frequently.

He rose to prominence as a skilled computer programmer in his teens. He was arrested and entered a guilty plea to hacking in 1995. He was fined but spared jail time provided he didn’t commit another crime. He enrolled at Melbourne University in his late 20s to study physics and mathematics.

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Launching Wikileaks

When Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006, he established an online “dead letter drop” for potential leakers.

The website gained notoriety in April 2010 after it released a classified video of an American helicopter attack in 2007 that claimed the lives of a dozen people residing in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, including two Reuters news team members.

It released about 90,000 classified US military documents related to the war in Afghanistan and roughly 400,000 classified US files related to the war in Iraq. In the history of the US military, the two leaks constituted the biggest security lapses of their sort.

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It was followed by the release of 250,000 classified diplomatic cables from US embassies abroad, some of which were picked up by publications including The New York Times and the UK’s The Guardian.

Politicians and military leaders in the US were angry and embarrassed by the leaks, claiming that the illegal distribution endangered lives.

Before being released on President Barack Obama’s orders, former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning spent seven years in a military prison for disclosing hundreds of thousands of messages and cables to WikiLeaks.

The start of legal battle

Assange’s detention was ordered by a Swedish court on 18 November 2010, following an investigation into allegations of sexual offenses made by two female Swedish volunteers at WikiLeaks. A European Arrest Warrant (EAW) issued by Sweden led to Assange’s arrest by British authorities on 7 December 2010.

From the very beginning, Assange refuted the charges and stated that he thought the Swedish investigation was a ruse to extradite him to the US to face charges related to WikiLeaks publications.

In February 2011, an order was made for his extradition to Sweden for questioning; however, his appeals were not successful. Shortly after the UK Supreme Court dismissed his last appeal, he went to the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in June 2012 to apply for asylum.

Seeking asylum in Ecuador

On 16 August 2012, Ecuador gave Assange asylum, but British police put up a round-the-clock guard to keep him from leaving and threatened to have him imprisoned if he did.

Assange was forced to live in cramped quarters in the embassy due to the impasse. In 2017, Swedish prosecutors concluded their investigation; nevertheless, British police threatened to arrest him if he left the embassy due to his previous failure to appear for bail.

During his time in the embassy, he had two children with his partner, Stella Moris.

The US case begins

Assange was taken out of the embassy and placed under arrest on 11 April 2019, following Ecuador’s revocation of his political asylum. He violated his bail terms and was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison the following month. The US Justice Department officially asked in June 2019 that Britain extradite him to the US so he may face 18 charges of conspiring to hack US government computers and breach espionage laws.

Even after serving his entire term in September 2019, Assange stayed behind bars at Belmarsh Maximum Security Prison while extradition proceedings were taking place.

A British judge decided on 4 January 2021, that Assange should not be extradited to the United States due to his mental health issues, which put him at risk of suicide.

The US authorities, however, won an appeal against that ruling in December 2021 at the High Court of London after providing a slew of guarantees regarding the terms of Assange’s detention in the case of a conviction, including a guarantee that he might be moved to Australia to carry out his sentence.

Assange tied the knot with Stella, his longtime companion, in Belmarsh on 23 March 2022.

Hopes for final battle

The extradition was granted by British Home Secretary (interior minister) Priti Patel in June 2022. However, last year, a London High Court judge denied his request for an appeal.

In front of two high-ranking judges, Assange’s legal team will launch a final bid to have the extradition ruling overturned in English courts on Tuesday during a two-day hearing.

His case will proceed to a full appeal if he wins. If he fails, the sole option left to prevent his extradition is to file an application with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which might halt his extradition.

Should Assange be extradited, his supporters say he could be held in a US high-security jail and if convicted could face a 175-year prison sentence. U.S. prosecutors have said it would be no more than 63 months.

With inputs from Reuters