[News] UK judge denies bail for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, days after rejecting his extradition to US

A British judge has denied bail for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, just days after she rejected a US request to extradite him to America.

The US already angered by the extradition request rejection, said it would appeal against the decision and asked for Assange to be remanded in custody while that process was ongoing.

Assange, 49, from Australia will remain in London’s Belmarsh prison, where he has already served a 50-week sentence for violating bail conditions back in 2012 when he entered Ecuador’s London embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden.

 

WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video, the Afghanistan war logs, the Iraq war logs and Cablegate. After the 2010 leaks, the United States government launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks.

In November 2010, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of sexual assault.[8] Assange said the allegations were a pretext for him to be extradited from Sweden to the United States because of his role in publishing secret American documents.

During the 2016 U.S. election campaign, WikiLeaks published confidential Democratic Party emails, showing that the party’s national committee favoured Hillary Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries.

On 4 January 2021, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled against the United States’ request to extradite him and stated that doing so would be “oppressive” by reason of his mental health.