Julian Assange bail: UK judge denies bail for WikiLeaks founder

London CNN — A British judge denied bail for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, just days after she rejected a US request to extradite him to America. Judge Vanessa Baraitser said in her Wednesday ruling that “there are substantial grounds for believing that if Mr. Assange is released today he would fail to surrender to court and face the appeal proceedings.” US prosecutors had argued on Wednesday that Assange had already shown he was “capable of going to extraordinary lengths to avoid extradition,” noting his seven-year stay inside a Ecuadorian embassy in London. Baraitser’s rejected the defense’s arguments, saying that Assange had “already demonstrated that he has been willing to flout the order of this court” and that “stringent conditions previously imposed upon him did nothing to prevent this.” The judge’s decision to deny bail comes after she ruled on Monday that while Assange would be afforded a “fair trial” in the event of extradition to the US, he should not be sent on the grounds that it would be “oppressive,” by reason of his mental health. Speaking outside the Westminster Magistrates Court on Wednesday, Stella Moris, Assange’s partner and the mother of the couple’s two children, said that Wednesday’s decision was a “huge disappointment.” She said “Julian should not be in Belmarsh Prison in the first place,” and called on the US Department of Justice to drop the charges and for Trump to pardon him before leaving office. Elizabeth Cook/PA/AP WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Prev Next On Monday, Moris said she was “extremely concerned” that the US government has decided to appeal the decision on the extradition case, saying that the move “continues to want to punish Julian and make him disappear into the deepest, darkest hole of the US prison system for the rest of his life.” Nils Muižnieks, Amnesty International’s Europe Director said in a Wednesday statement that the decision to refuse Assange’s bail application “renders his ongoing detention ‘arbitrary,’ and compounds the fact that he has endured punishing conditions in high security detention at Belmarsh prison for more than a year.” Muižnieks added that it was “clear” that Assange should have not been jailed pending extradition in the first place, saying that the charges against him are “politically motivated, and the UK government should never have so willingly assisted the US in its unrelenting pursuit of Assange.” “The US government is behaving as if they have jurisdiction all over the world to pursue any person who receives and publishes information about government wrongdoing.