Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will resume his legal battle in a London court on Monday to avoid extradition to the United States. He is facing charges under the US Espionage Act for the 2010 release of hundreds of thousands of secret US military and diplomatic documents on the Iraq and Afghan wars, revealing civilian deaths as well as torture and clandestine military operations. 

If found guilty, Assange could be jailed for 175 years.

There are 17 Espionage Act charges and one count of computer hacking that he faces. Seen by his followers as a champion of free speech, his critics in the US have accused him of endangering the lives of intelligence sources in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.

Assange’s lawyer Dupond-Moretti had said this would be “a disgraceful and unbearable sentence.”

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“Journalists and whistle-blowers who reveal illegal activity by companies or governments and war crimes – such as the publications Julian has been charged for – should be protected from prosecution,” she said.

Assange, who had spent much of the past decade in Ecuador’s London embassy, lost the protected status in 2019, after the Ecuador Presidential election in 2019. Subsequently, he was dragged from the embassy and was jailed for 50 weeks in the British prison of Belmarsh, in the east of London. 

“The situation is critical from a judicial point of view. We remind members of the Council of Europe and the international community that the UK is holding without shame a man who has made public information of public interest,” said the International Federation of Journalists in a statement ahead of the hearing.  

Meanwhile, a French rights group urged the Macron government to offer political asylum to Assange, addressing an appeal to his former lawyer, Eric Dupond-Moretti, now the Justice Minister of France.