Sputnik and RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan forcefully condemned the ruling by a London court to allow the extradition of Julian Assange, characterising the journalist as a modern-day Galileo who has done more for free speech than anyone in a century.
“Julian Assange has done more for free speech than anyone in the past hundred years. Assange is the Galileo of our time, a man who has changed the world, a man who voluntarily went to certain death in order to tell people the truth,” Simonyan wrote on her Telegram page on Friday.
“In a normal society, he would be revered as a saint. But in an abnormal one, he is extradited to the US, where he will be soldered to an electric chair or face something like 120 years in prison,” she added. “Burn in hell, Pharisees. I curse you,” Simonyan raged, referring to the Biblical enemies of Jesus Christ.
London High Court Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde ruled Friday in favour of a US government appeal requesting Assange’s extradition to the United States. Assange’s fiance, Stella Moris, called the ruling a “grave miscarriage of justice” and vowed that Holroyde’s decision would be appealed as soon as possible.
The US government charges Assange with crimes under the rarely used Espionage Act over 1917 over WikiLeaks’ publication of thousands of military and diplomatic documents, including videos exposing alleged US war crimes in the Middle East. If convicted, the journalist could die in prison.
Journalists, human rights defenders, and civil rights activists around the world have slammed Assange’s persecution at the hands of UK and US authorities, arguing that efforts to prosecute him constitute an attack on press freedom and could serve as a precedent-setting case allowing the US government to go after anyone Washington happens to disagree with politically or feels threatened by.
Assange has been jailed at Britain’s Belmarsh Prison since 2019 after getting dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London by Metropolitan Police on breach of bail charges. He took shelter in the Embassy in 2012 amid fears of politically motivated persecution and extradition to the US via Sweden, where two women accused him of sex crimes. The latter charges were eventually dropped, with Assange maintaining his innocence throughout.