Members of the Bundestag , the German parliament, have created a special working group designed to secure the liberation of the Australian Julian Assange, a journalist and founder of WikiLeaks , according to Spiegel.
Representatives of the group announced that they intend to defend freedom of the press and freedom of speech and demand to prevent the extradition of Assange to the United States authorities.
The group included representatives of all parliamentary factions with the exception of the nationalist “Alternative for Germany”, with which other parties avoid joining any coalitions.
Earlier, Assange was called to release in United Nations : UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Niels Meltzer stated that the journalist’s life is threatened by the outbreak of coronavirus in the prison where he is being held, and his conditions of detention are equivalent to severe torture.
American Justice Department filed 17 charges against Assange in May 2019, adding one more later. In case of extradition to the United States, which is currently under way, the founder of WikiLeaks faces up to 175 years in prison. The current President of the States Donald Trump claimed that he was ready to pardon Assange if he named the source from which he received the texts of letters from the hacked servers Democratic Party in 2016
In 2012, fearing extradition to Sweden due to rape charges (the case was dropped in 2019), Assange applied for asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. There he was continuously for almost seven years. Assange is currently serving a prison sentence in the UK for violating bail conditions.