Julian Assange launches legal challenge against the US

Julian Assange has launched a legal challenge against the Trump administration amid fears he could be extradited to the US once his increasingly precarious seven-year stay at the Ecuadorian embassy in London comes to end.

Lawyers for the WikiLeaks founder, who has been living at the embassy since 2012 when he was granted diplomatic immunity, have filed an urgent application to the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

This is aimed at forcing the hand of US prosecutors by requiring them to “unseal” any secret charges against him, reports NBC News.

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WikiLeaks says federal prosecutors have been pressing witnesses in the US and abroad to testify against Assange, “offering further evidence that the Justice Department is building a criminal case against the man who leaked Democratic emails hacked by the Russians in the 2016 election”, says the site.

The Guardian says the legal move “is an attempt to prevent Assange’s extradition to the US at a time that a new Ecuadorian government has been making his stay in the central London apartment increasingly inhospitable”.

Politico reports that Assange's protection by the government of Ecuador “appears on shaky ground”, adding the relationship has deteriorated since the new government took office in the Latin American country in 2017.

In December, the country’s President Lenin Moreno said Assange can leave the London embassy.

According to the Associated Press, Moreno said he has received sufficient written guarantees from the British government that the Australian hacker would not be extradited to any country where he would face the death penalty, seemingly ruling out the US.

Assange’s “chief fear, however, is that once arrested, the US authorities would begin fresh extradition proceedings against him alleging security offences”, says the Guardian.