Orange Blossoms for Julian Assange. Today the founder of WikiLeaks is married to Stella Moris, one of his former lawyers, in a ceremony celebrated in the maximum security prison of Belmarsh, in south-east London. There will be only four guests and two witnesses but Assange supporters have been asked to show up outside the prison dressed in full dress, as if they were attending the event in person.

The groom will wear a kilt, in homage to his Scottish origins, designed by Vivienne Westwood.

The 50-year-old Australian faces a sentence of 175 years in prison in total: on March 14 the British Supreme Court refused to examine his appeal, and thus the hope of avoiding extradition has vanished. In fact, the American courts want to try him for the dissemination, since 2010, of over 700 thousand confidential documents on American military and diplomatic activities, in particular in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Assange and Moris first met in 2011 when the lawyer was hired to join the legal team fighting extradition. Their engagement was announced in November 2021. The 38-year-old South African had two children with Assange, two boys conceived while living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The founder of WikiLeaks spent seven years there after taking refuge in 2012 while out on bail. He then feared extradition to the United States, or to Sweden, where he was the subject of rape proceedings. He was eventually arrested by the British police in April 2019.

(Unioneonline / ss)