Julian Assange has declined a chance to consent to his extradition to the US at a court hearing in London where the American government started pressing its case to take him across the Atlantic.
Appearing by videolink from Belmarsh prison, Assange said: “I do not wish to surrender myself for extradition for doing journalism that has won many, many awards and protected many, many people.”
Ben Brandon, counsel for the US government, presented details of the US case against Assange at Westminster magistrates court. He said that the charges related to one of the largest compromises of information in the history of the US.
They were connected to the downloading of a “vast amount of classified documents” by Chelsea Manning, the US intelligence analyst who subsequently served a prison sentence.
They included approximately 90,000 reports about the war in Afghanistan, 400,000 reports about the Iraq war and 800,000 Guantánamo Bay detainee assessments, as well as a large number of US diplomatic cables.
Referring to other details in a March 2018 indictment – which was unsealed last month in the US district court for the eastern district of Virginia and which charged Assange – Brandon said that details of chatroom communications between Manning and Assange demonstrated that he had agreed to help Manning with cracking a password that protected US Department of Defense computers.
Those computers were then used to download material which was transmitted to WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing website Assange founded.
Consenting meant that he would lose his rights to appeal but the advantage was that it would expedite matters and could lead to an early resolution of his case, Snow said. Assange, who appeared wearing a black jacket and T-shirt, declined.
Snow asked Brandon what the maximum sentence in the US was for the offences and was told that it was five years, before the case was adjourned until 12 June in anticipation of a formal request for extradition being served by the US within the period required.
There will be a another merely procedural hearing on May 30, where I suspect even less will happen, he added.
The next hearing where something of substance would happen would be 12 June because, by then, Assange would have received all of the paperwork from the US, the judge said. However, he said that he suspected that it would take many months before the full substance of Assange’s case was heard.
The 47-year-old was jailed on Thursday for just under a year for breaching bail conditions to avoid being extradited to Sweden.
A judge largely rejected the mitigating factors put forward by lawyers for Assange who took refuge in Ecuador’s embassy to London in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over sexual assault allegations, which he has denied and told him it was difficult to envisage a more serious example of the offence.