Julian Assange’s European defence team have said they will try to seek asylum for him in France, reports The Guardian.
Hearings over Assange’s extradition from the UK to the US on spying charges are due to start next week in London.
Éric Dupond-Moretti said the “fate and the status of all journalists” was at stake in Assange’s case. “We consider the situation is sufficiently serious,” he said, “that our duty is to talk about it” with the French president, Emmanuel Macron.
He was one of a team of lawyers lined up at a Paris news conference to explain why they view the case against Assange as unfair, citing his poor health and alleged violations of his rights while in jail in London.
French members of the team said they had been working on a “concrete demand” for Macron to grant Assange asylum in France, where he has children and where WikiLeaks had a presence at its founding.
Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish coordinator of Assange’s team, reiterated his client’s plan to claim that the Trump administration offered him a pardon in return for saying Russia was not involved in leaking Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 US election campaign.