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UK Home Secretary Priti Patel has asked US to praise her over the Julian Assange extradition decision to the country, according to the WikiLeaks statement on 7 July.
Last month, Home Secretary Priti Patel approved his extradition, with her office saying British courts had concluded his extradition would not be incompatible with his human rights, and that he would be treated appropriately.
As per the Wall Street Report, after Patel’s ruling on 17 June, a UK official had asked if officials in the US Embassy in London or at the Justice Department could release a statement welcoming Priti Patel’s ruling.
It further added that she would appreciate such a show of support, according to people familiar with the request.
However, the Justice Department had declined to issue any such statement, they said, prompting some questions about whether the administration planned to see the prosecution through.
Meanwhile, on 2 July, Assange's brother Gabriel Shipton said that an appeal has been filed to the High Court in London to block Julian's extradition to the US to face criminal charges.
Apart from this, Shipton told Reuters that, “We also urge the Australian government to intervene immediately in the case to end this nightmare."
As per the WSJ report, Assange’s lawyers are appealing both Patel’s decision and elements of a ruling by District Judge Vanessa Baraitser last year, which broadly focused on whether Assange would get a fair trial in the US, the details of the appeals weren’t made public.
Stella Moris, Julian's wife had said that extradition to the US would drive him to commit suicide. "Julian wants to live, with the possibility of freedom, the possibility of being with his children and with me. The fact is if he is extradited to the United States, the conditions he will be under will be so oppressive," she had told reporters.
"It will drive him to take his own life."
The Australian-born Assange has been involved in a legal fight in Britain for more than a decade and it could now go on for many more months.
Charges against Julian Assange
In 2009, WikiLeaks rocked the world when it published around 750,000 classified US documents and diplomatic cables which exposed possible war crimes, torture and secret military operations, as well as unveiling the often-unseemly behind-the-scenes activities of US diplomacy.
A US military intelligence officer, Chelsea Manning, was arrested and sentenced to prison for leaking the files to WikiLeaks.
US authorities alleged that Assange directed and abetted Manning in stealing the files, when he tried to help her break a passcode to a Pentagon computer system.
On that basis, on April 11, 2019 the Department of Justice (DOJ) unsealed initial charges against Assange for conspiracy to break into a classified computer system to obtain "national defense information," and requested his extradition from Britain.
Twelve days later, the department issued a superseding indictment, charging him with 17 counts under the US Espionage Act.
It said that Assange, a citizen of Australia, had stolen US defense and national security information and disclosed it, putting the country, its officials and confidential sources at risk.
The charges under the espionage act are particularly troubling to civil liberties defenders and the media.
Assange calls himself a journalist, and though Wikileaks when created in 2006 was a new kind of activity -- a website that collected secret documents and published them online for anyone to see -- it was not deeply different from traditional media publishing government secrets.
Viewed from that angle, Assange's publishing activities could be protected by the US Constitution's First amendment, which explicitly guarantees freedom of the press.
"The new charges focus on receiving and publishing classified material from a government source. That is something journalists do all the time," the New York Times wrote in an editorial on the day the indictment was released.
"This is what the First Amendment is designed to protect: the ability of publishers to provide the public with the truth."
The government of Barack Obama, president from 2009-2017, opted to not go after Assange to avoid a constitutional fight over what is journalism and what is not.
But the next administration of Republican president Donald Trump took a hard line, branding Assange a foreign threat and Wikileaks a "hostile intelligence service."
"The department takes seriously the role of journalists in our democracy. But Julian Assange is no journalist," Trump's assistant attorney general John Demers said when the charges were unveiled.
What awaits for Julian Assange in the US? -
Assange could stall any extradition with his appeals both in Britain and the European Court of Human Rights.
But if he is finally sent to the US, he will stand trial in a federal court in Alexandria, known for its tough handling of sensitive intelligence and espionage-related cases.
On the original charge, of helping an attempt to break into Pentagon computers, Assange would face up to five years in prison.
But the charges under the Espionage Act could bring up to 175 years in prison.
Assange's attorneys in Britain originally blocked extradition last year arguing that he was at risk of suicide and would not be safe in poorly managed US prisons.
On appeal, US authorities promised to the British courts that Assange would be closely watched, would not be subjected to solitary confinement, and would not be sent to a "supermax" prison that the US reserves for the most dangerous offenders terrorists.
(With inputs from agencies)