WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could be sentenced to life in prison if the UK extradite him to the US simply for telling the truth, former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has said.
The progressive leader and most charismatic president in the history of Brazil, who spent 580 days in prison before the Justice annulled his corruption proceedings, came out in defense of Assange shortly after the British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, signed the order of extradition of the Australian journalist.
"Today they made the decision to extradite Assange to the United States. If he is extradited, it will surely be life imprisonment and he will die in jail. And we have to ask ourselves: what crime did Assange commit? he only told the truth"affirmed the favorite for the presidential elections next October in Brazil in a message that he published on his social networks.
The founder of WikiLeaks, who has been in custody in the United Kingdom for more than ten years, is accused in the United States of 18 crimes of espionage and computer intrusion for having publicly exposed the abuses of the North American country in Guantánamo (Cuba), Iraq and Afghanistan, and having disclosed hundreds of confidential documents.
Assange alone "he denounced the tricks and espionage carried out by the most important country on the planet. If someone committed a crime, it was the one who, on behalf of the United States, was spying on other countries"Lula stated.
The leader of the Workers’ Party (PT) said that, after the revelation of the illegal wiretapping of different world leaders, the United States apologized to the German Angela Merkel but did not do the same with Brazil despite the fact that the leaked documents revealed that he spied on both then-president Dilma Rousseff and the state oil company Petrobras.
He added that instead of being imprisoned and sentenced, the Australian should be receiving a Nobel Prize or an Oscar. "for decency and courage".
The UK Home Secretary signed the extradition order on Friday after a British court authorized the release of the Australian journalist on April 20 to be considered by the UK government.
Assange has been confined in the United Kingdom for more than ten years without being convicted, first under house arrest as a result of a case of alleged sexual crimes already filed, and between 2012 and 2019 he was a refugee in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
After his departure from that diplomatic legation in 2019, after Quito withdrew his refuge, the journalist remains in the Belmarsh high-security prison, east of London.