: What to Know About Julian Assange’s Extradition Appeal #WorldNEWS This week lawyers for the U. S. government began a legal challenge to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the U. K.

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What to Know About Julian Assange’s Extradition Appeal #WorldNEWS
This week lawyers for the U. S. government began a legal challenge to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the U. K. to face charges of violating the Espionage Act.
Assange is wanted in the U. S. on 18 criminal charges after WikiLeaks published thousands of secret U. S. military and diplomatic documents concerning the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in 2010.
In a two-day hearing in the British High Court, the U. S. government appealed a Jan. 4 ruling by a London district judge declining to extradite Assange to the U. S. largely due to the risk he would take his own life in a maximum security prison.
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Key recent developments—including new assurances about how Assange would be treated by the U. S. —were brought before a British judge tasked with reviewing the lower court’s ruling and considering whether the risk to Assange’s safety had changed.
Here’s what you need to know about the appeal and the story so far:
Who is Julian Assange and what is his website, WikiLeaks?
Australian cyber activist Assange launched WikiLeaks in 2006. The non-profit was set up with the aim of exposing state secrets its founder argued should be in the public domain. In 2010, U. S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning provided WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of highly classified internal documents.
The publications included revelation of what appeared to be war crimes. Footage released in April 2010 showed U. S. soldiers shooting and killing civilians from a helicopter in Iraq. It also included sensitive information about human intelligence sources and surveillance techniques, disclosure of which the U. S. argues put lives at risk.
Later that year, in November 2010, Swedish authorities issued an arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of rape and other sexual offences. Assange was working in London at the time, and claimed the allegations were fabricated in order to facilitate his extradition from Sweden to the U. S. for publishing the sensitive documents.
Facing extradition to Sweden, Assange skipped bail in June 2012 and sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Two months later, Ecuador granted him asylum on the grounds of political persecution. He resided in the embassy building for seven years, during which time the Swedish investigation was dropped in 2019.

Daniel Leal-Olivas—AFP/Getty ImagesWikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gestures from the window of a prison van as he is driven into Southwark Crown Court in London on May 1 2019, before being sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for breaching his bail conditions in 2012.
Why does the U. S. want to extradite Assange?
In April 2019, after a series of behavioral transgressions alleged by the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Ecuador revoked his diplomatic asylum.

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