A British judge said today that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange must attend the next preliminary hearing in his extradition trial to the US unless he provides medical evidence to justify his absence.
Assange's lawyers said that due to health reasons he could not participate in the hearing today via video link from prison.
District Judge Vanesa Baraitser scheduled the next preliminary hearing for July 27.
The 48-year-old Australian has been indicted in the US on 18 counts of leaking classified government documents. Prosecutors accuse him of conspiring with US military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, while she was a man (Bradley Manning), to crack the password and break into the Pentagon's computer system, download and publish secret diplomatic cables and military files on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last week, the US Department of Justice expanded the impeachment against Assange, which alleges that he conspired with members of a hacking group and that he sought to recruit other hackers to supply his WikiLeaks with classified information. Assange was arrested last year when he left the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, which was sheltering him, to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape and sexual assault charges. He is now in London's Belmarsh prison awaiting the main hearing of the extradition trial, which was supposed to be in May, but was postponed to September 7 due to the pandemic.
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