Watch the video to know more about the extradition hearing

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A lawyer for the United States said in extradition hearing that Julian Assange put lives at risk.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is wanted in the U.S. after leaking hundreds of thousands of secret military documents and diplomatic cables in 2010.

U.S. authorities want a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison for Assange for putting people’s lives at risk.

Lawyer James Lewis, representing the U.S. government, said at London’s Woolwich Crown Court: “What Mr. Assange seems to defend by freedom of speech is not the publication of the classified materials.”

“But the publication of the names of the sources, the names of people who had put themselves at risk to assist the United States and its allies.”

He also said that reporting or journalism is not an excuse for criminal activities or a license to break ordinary criminal laws.

Lewis said the guilt or innocence of Mr. Assange will be determined at trial in the United States and not in this court as it is an extradition hearing.

48-year-old Assange, who is fighting extradition from Britain to the United States, argued he was acting as a journalist entitled to First Amendment protection.

He said the leaked documents exposed U.S. military wrongdoing.

One of the videos leaked by WikiLeaks shows a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad.

The attack killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.

Assange’s lawyer Edward Fitzgerald said former President Barack Obama had decided that Assange should not be extradited in 2013.

However, it changed when Trump became the President.

Fitzgerald said the changes were made when the “President Trump came into power with a new approach to freedom of speech and a new hostility to the press amounting effectively to declaring war on investigative journalists.”

Supporters of Assange hailed him as a hero as he tried to reveal governments’ abuses of power.

Journalism organizations and civil liberties groups said the charges against Assange are an infringement of journalists’ rights.

 

 

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