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00:00 After years of legal wrangling, Julian Assange faces what could be his final hope of escaping
00:05 extradition. A London court will rule on Tuesday if the 52-year-old Wikileaks founder has the
00:11 right to appeal his extradition to the United States on espionage charges. The British government
00:16 had agreed to transfer him to the US in June 2022.
00:20 The whistleblowing website Wikileaks, which Assange founded in 2006, first came to prominence
00:25 four years later when it published a leaked video of a US helicopter strike on a Baghdad
00:30 market that killed 18 civilians. Later that year, Wikileaks, in collaboration with several
00:35 media outlets, started publishing hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables.
00:40 A US military operative, Chelsea Manning, was court-martialed in 2013 for leaking the
00:45 documents to Assange. In 2010, Assange faced extradition to Sweden on charges of rape.
00:51 They were later dropped because of time lapsed. But the Australian skipped bail in 2012 and
00:56 was given asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. While in the embassy, he was accused
01:01 of collusion with Moscow in leaking emails damaging to Hillary Clinton during the 2016
01:07 US presidential election. A change of government in Ecuador ousted him from the embassy in
01:11 April 2019. He was promptly arrested by British police for failing to appear in court. And
01:16 in May 2019, he was further indicted by US authorities on charges of espionage. He has
01:22 been held in Belmarsh prison ever since as he awaits extradition. Assange's defenders,
01:28 including Reporters Without Borders and the media outlets he has collaborated with, say
01:32 the United States' pursuit of him is an attack on freedom of the press, a position his wife
01:37 shares.
01:38 He is being accused of journalism. This case is an admission by the United States that
01:45 they now criminalize investigative journalism. It's an attack on all journalists all over
01:53 the world. It's an attack on the truth and it's an attack on the public's right to know.
01:58 If Julian Assange's efforts to secure an appeal fail, his last option would be to appeal to
02:04 the European Court of Human Rights.