Australian Julian Assange and his fiancée, South African lawyer Stella Moris, marry Wednesday in a British high-security prison where the WikiLeaks founder has been held since his arrest in 2019 at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Assange, 50, is trying by all means not to be extradited to the United States, which wants to try him for the publication of hundreds of thousands of secret documents, many of which revealed the abuses committed by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Last week, the British Supreme Court denied him the possibility of appealing the surrender, for which British Interior Minister Priti Patel now has the final say.
Assange and Moris secretly had two children during the nearly seven years that the Australian lived as a refugee in the Ecuadorian legation in London, where he was arrested in April 2019 when President Lenin Moreno withdrew the protection that his predecessor Rafael Correa had given him in 2012.
In November, they announced their engagement and obtained permission to marry in Belmarsh prison, south of the capital.
According to its support platform, the liaison will be conducted by a civil registry officer and only four guests and two witnesses will attend.
The bride's dress, a young lawyer who joined Assange's team of defenders in 2011, was designed by legendary 80-year-old British creator Vivienne Westwood, who has long supported Assange's cause.
The Australian will wear a kilt, in a nod to his ancestors.
- Exhaust “all resources” -
Guests must leave immediately after the ceremony, but dozens of supporters plan to gather in front of the jail, where Moris — who asked for donations for legal expenses instead of gifts — will cut a wedding cake and give a speech.
Assange has become a workhorse for press freedom advocates, who accuse Washington of trying to silence relevant security information. But the US authorities claim that he is not a journalist but a computer hacker and endangered the lives of many informants by publishing the entire documents without first editing them.
If convicted of espionage in the United States, Assange could be sentenced to 175 years in prison.
His defense, coordinated by former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, argued that he could commit suicide if he was exposed to the US prison system. And at first he succeeded in getting the British justice to prove him right.
But the US executive appealed and convinced the judges that he would be held in good conditions, with adequate psychological treatment, and obtained the go-ahead on his surrender.
“We will exhaust all national and international resources to defend those who have committed no crime and who have heroically and courageously resisted persecution for more than eleven years for defending freedom of expression and access to information,” Garzón said, suggesting that his battle against extradition might not end here.
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