Security News > 2021 > July > US offers Julian Assange time in Australian prison instead of American supermax if he loses London extradition fight
Julian Assange will remain in a British prison for now after the US government won permission to appeal against a January court ruling that freed him from extradition to America.
News of the appeal came as the US Department of Justice offered Assange a deal that would keep him out of the notoriously cruel US supermax prisons, according to The Times.
Assange has always claimed his prosecution under the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is politically motivated revenge because he embarrassed government officials and revealed the extent of American wrongdoing in its Middle Eastern wars, especially with the Apache gunship helicopter footage that WikiLeaks dubbed "Collateral Murder".
Crucially the US alleges Assange went far beyond mere publication, as a journalist, and directly commissioned the theft of secret data from Department of Defence networks, and the cracking of a password protecting those materials.
Assange has spent a decade on the run from the US. He was accused in Sweden of sexually assaulting a woman and an EU Arrest Warrant, at the time enforceable in the UK, was issued against him.
With the only legal barrier to Assange's extradition being his mental state, the only chance he has of staying in the UK is to prove to the judge that he would commit suicide if sent abroad. The current US indictment against him contains 17 charges, totalling 175 years in prison if he were found guilty on all of them.