British Court will hand Assange to Sweden

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will be handed to Sweden. As Associated Press writes Great British Court has made such a decision.

Remind that J. Assange, 40, has spent the better part of two years fighting attempts to send him to the Sweden, where he is wanted over sex crime allegations. He has yet to be charged.

Supreme Court President Nicholas Phillips, reading out the verdict, acknowledged that coming to a conclusion in the high-profile case had “not been simple.”

But he said that the court had ultimately concluded that “the request for Mr. Assange’s extradition has been lawfully made and his appeal against extradition is accordingly dismissed.”

Assange lawyer Dinah Rose stood up after the verdict to complain that the court’s ruling largely relied on a treaty whose interpretation she says she never had the chance to challenge, requesting time to study the judgment with an eye toward trying to reopen the case.

Such a maneuver is practically unheard of, according to attorney Karen Todner, whose law firm handles many high-profile extradition cases.

Assange, a former computer hacker from Australia, became known for the whole world in 2010 when he released of hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. documents, including a hard-to-watch video that showed U.S. forces gunning down a crowd of Iraqi civilians and journalists that they’d mistaken for insurgents.

His release of a quarter-million classified U.S. State Department cables in the final months of that year outraged Washington and destabilized American diplomacy worldwide.

But his work exposing government secrets increasingly came under a cloud after two Swedish women accused him of molestation and rape following a visit to the country in mid-2010. Assange denies the accusation and says the sex was consensual, but has refused to go to Sweden, claiming he won’t get a fair trial there.