Julian Assange will be not extradited to the U.S., a UK Central Criminal Court judge announced on Monday.
During a speech in which she dismissed many of the arguments made by Assange’s lawyers, district judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that the WikiLeaks co-founder’s past actions wouldn’t “be protected by free speech” if they took place in England and Wales, and that his attempts to recruit hackers “took him outside” the role of an investigative journalist, per The Independent.
But she ultimately ruled against extradition due to assessments on Assange’s mental health, describing him as “a depressed and sometimes despairing man,” and a potential suicide risk.
The U.S. will now have the option to appeal, and the government said it will.
Assange was arrested in London in April 2019 after being charged with 18 separate counts under America’s 102-year-old Espionage Act for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to break a password to a classified U.S. government computer” by the Department of Justice. He’s been fighting extradition ever since — Assange would have faced up to 175 fears in U.S. prison if the extradition had gone ahead.
The charge, per court documents referred to by the DOJ, relates to “Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.”
Assange co-founded WikiLeaks, an organization which “specializes in the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption,” back in 2006.
10 million documents have so far been published.