U.S. says Assange won’t face supermax prison if extradited

Julian Assange won’t face solitary confinement or supermax prison in Colorado if he’s jailed in the U.S., as lawyers for the country argued his extradition shouldn’t have been blocked by a London judge on mental health grounds.

The U.S. laid out several assurances over his potential confinement and access to psychological treatment at the start of the London appeal calling for Assange to be sent to the U.S to face espionage charges. U.S. lawyers also said they agree to transferring the 50-year-old to Australia to serve out any sentence.

Assange has spent the last decade either in a U.K. prison or in Ecuador’s embassy in London as criminal charges over rape and his role in releasing hundreds of thousands of pages of classified documents via WikiLeaks stacked up.

A London judge blocked Assange’s extradition in January over citing the risk of suicide in a U.S. jail. The Australian national remains in a British high-security prison. Lawyers for the U.S. argued Wednesday that the judge never gave them the opportunity to make assurances before ruling.

“The assurances attempt to address one notorious prison regime and one notorious prison, and say nothing about any of the other severely isolating prison regimes or other notorious prisons in the USA about which the DJ heard copious evidence,” Edward Fitzgerald, Assange’s lawyer, said in documents prepared for the appeal.