Countdown To Day X: The Passage of Time In Assange's Case

Assange’s legal team will ask the British High Court of Justice to grapple with the “lapse of time” that has made extradition “unjust and oppressive.

Editor’s Note: Ahead of a major appeal hearing before the British High Court of Justice on February 20 and 21, the “Countdown To Day X” series highlights key aspects of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s appeal against extradition to the United States.

For a little more than 13 years, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been detained.

In 2016, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention recognized that Assange had been subjected to “different forms of deprivation of liberty”—10 days of isolation at Wandsworth Prison in London, 550 days of house arrest in the United Kingdom, and at that time, around four and a half years of asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy, where he endured “extensive surveillance by the British police.” 

The United States government secretly indicted Assange on December 22, 2017, and charged him with conspiracy to commit a computer intrusion. He lived in the embassy for about three more years until he was arrested on April 11, 2019, and jailed at His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh in London. He has been held in “Britain’s Guantanamo” for nearly five years. 

Read the full article at The Dissenter.