Valentina Shvartsman - Lawyers defending WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have not received adequate time with him during his confinement at a high-security UK prison, Renata Avila, a member of the legal team, told Sputnik
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 28th January, 2020) Lawyers defending WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have not received adequate time with him during his confinement at a high-security UK prison, Renata Avila, a member of the legal team, told Sputnik.
"Only two hours of legal consultation were made available for Julian between December 19 and January 13. That is the problem that the lawyers have," Avila said.
The 48-year-old Australian is fighting extradition to the United States on 18 charges, including conspiring to hack government computers and breaching an espionage law, after his website leaked hundreds of thousands of secret cables in 2010 that exposed the US military's wrongdoings.
Westminster Magistrates' Court in London ruled last week to split a month-long extradition hearing into two parts, with a week-long session set to begin on February 24 and the rest pushed back to May and early June.
Avila said that Assange's legal team would be in trouble if they continued getting as much access to their defendant as they had managed to negotiate over the past weeks.
"Imagine if that will be the dynamic between the beginning of March and his hearing in May! If that is the case there would be not enough time to prepare for such a complex set of hearings with lots of technical evidence, with lots of witnesses," she maintained.
Avila argued that she did not see any clear signs of Assange getting more time with his lawyers in the near future.
The lawyer also stressed that even the delay of the second half of Assange's US extradition case hearing until May did not substantially change the balance of power of the whole case.
"I think that even with the extension of time it is not equality of arms. You cannot, not even with the best lawyers, win a political persecution that has all the resources in the world on the other side and also that had access to the arguments and to the strategy of your defense team. I don't know why this case is not over yet," Avila maintained.
Assange is awaiting the hearing at Belmarsh Prison in east London. He was forcibly removed from the Ecuadorean embassy in the UK capital in April of last year after he was stripped of asylum status. He had lived at the diplomatic mission since skipping bail in 2012 for fear of being handed over to the US.
