DOJ confirms Biden will proceed push for Assange’s extradition as human rights teams name to drop case earlier than US enchantment deadline

The Joe Biden administration will proceed to pursue extradition for Julian Assange, the Justice Division stated, rebuffing calls from rights teams to reverse course forward of an enchantment deadline within the WikiLeaks co-founder’s case.

DOJ spokesman Marc Raimondi stated on Tuesday that Washington has not deserted plans for Assange’s extradition from the UK, noting that Biden will nonetheless problem a January ruling from a British decide barring extradition over issues that Assange may take his personal life in American custody.

“We proceed to hunt his extradition,” Raimondi informed Reuters, signaling that the brand new Biden administration will decide up the place ex-president Donald Trump left off in looking for to cost the anti-secrecy activist for his publication of categorised paperwork.

The assertion from the DOJ comes mere days earlier than a February 12 deadline for the US authorities to submit its “grounds for enchantment” in Assange’s extradition case, wherein American attorneys will argue in opposition to UK Decide Vanessa Baraitser’s ruling in opposition to the transfer.

Additionally on rt.com

Calls on Washington to desert the Assange case picked up momentum within the waning days of the Trump presidency, with activists and journalists throughout the political spectrum demanding he pardon the WikiLeaks writer earlier than his time period was up. Whereas Trump in the end refused to grant clemency, a lot of the identical stress has carried over to the Biden administration, illustrated most not too long ago in a letter from some two dozen civil liberties organizations condemning the indictments in opposition to Assange as a “grave risk to press freedom.”

“The indictment of Mr. Assange threatens press freedom as a result of a lot of the conduct described within the indictment is conduct that journalists interact in routinely – and that they have to interact in with the intention to do the work the general public wants them to do,” stated Monday’s letter, organized by the Freedom of the Press Basis and signed by the ACLU, Amnesty Worldwide and the Committee to Defend Journalists, amongst others.

Information organizations incessantly and essentially publish categorised data with the intention to inform the general public of issues of profound public significance.

NEW: We're becoming a member of a coalition of two dozen press freedom, civil liberties, and human rights teams in calling on the Biden administration to drop the prosecution of Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange https://t.co/nVYUbSIbg1

— Freedom of the Press (@FreedomofPress) February eight, 2021

The letter, addressed on to Biden’s DOJ, echoed an identical argument accepted by former president Barack Obama, who declined to cost Assange throughout his eight years in workplace on the grounds that WikiLeaks’ actions have been too shut to straightforward journalistic conduct. Biden, who served as vp below Obama, seems to have deserted that stance, as an alternative following by way of on Trump’s extradition drive.

Assange faces 17 prison counts below the Espionage Act for his position in publishing categorised materials, together with a whole bunch of 1000’s of pages of paperwork that made up the Iraq and Afghan Battle Logs, in addition to the notorious ‘Collateral Homicide’ video, which exhibits a US gunship firing on a crowd of Iraqi civilians – a few of them journalists – in 2007. He’s at the moment in custody at London’s most safety Belmarsh jail, the place he awaits the conclusion of his extradition trial.

Suppose your folks would have an interest? Share this story!