It was a big win for WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange after the London High Court ruled on Monday (May 20) that the US assurances over his case were unsatisfactory and he would get a full appeal hearing, the news agency Reuters reported.

It was a big win for WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange after the London High Court ruled on Monday (May 20) that the US assurances over his case were unsatisfactory and he would get a full appeal hearing, the news agency Reuters reported. In a short ruling, two senior judges of the high court said the US submissions were not sufficient and said they would allow the appeal to go ahead. In March, the court provisionally gave Assange, 52, permission to appeal on three grounds. But it gave the US the opportunity to provide satisfactory assurances that it would not seek the death penalty and would allow him to seek to rely on a First Amendment right to free speech in a trial. Also read | Julian Assange has talked about suicide amid 'very dark times in prison', says wife Stella Earlier in the day, Assange's wife Stella arrived at the London High Court ahead of the judgment. Addressing a press conference, Stella said she hoped the court would do the right thing, and pass a judgment in her husband's favour. "We hope that the courts do the right thing today and find in Julian’s favour. But if they don’t, we will take an emergency injunction, we will seek an emergency injunction from the European Court of Human Rights," Stella said. Who is Julian Assange? Born in 1971, Julian Assange is an Australian editor and activist. He launched WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks gained prominence in April 2010 when it published a classified video showing a 2007 US helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in Iraq's capital Baghdad. The website has released thousands of classified US military documents on the war in Afghanistan, and hundreds of thousands of US secret files on the Iraq war. Assange had been battling extradition from the United Kingdom (UK) to the US, where he is wanted on criminal charges over the release of confidential American military records and diplomatic cables. What would've happened if Assange was extradited? If Assange was extradited, the 52-year-old would have faced a sentence of up to 175 years in a maximum security prison. Assange was first arrested in the UK in 2010 on a Swedish warrant over sex crime allegations that were later dropped. Since then, he has been under house arrest, holed up in Ecuador's embassy in London for seven years and, since 2019, held in the Belmarsh top security jail, while awaiting a ruling on his extradition. If the high court judges had ruled that the extradition could go ahead, Assange's legal avenues in the UK would have been exhausted and his lawyers would turn to the European Court of Human Rights for an emergency injunction blocking deportation pending a full hearing by that court, Reuters reported. But in this case, the judges rejected the US assurances, and Assange has permission to appeal his extradition case and the appeal might not be heard until next year. (With inputs from agencies)

Big win for Julian Assange: WikiLeaks’ founder given permission to appeal against US extradition

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Big win for Julian Assange: WikiLeaks’ founder given permission to appeal against US extradition