London: The Royal Courts of Justice concluded on Friday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can be extradited to the United States to face espionage charges, overturning a lower court verdict earlier this year.

According to sources, Assange, 50, is wanted in the United States on charges of revealing national defence information after WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of classified military documents from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars a decade ago.

Since 2019, Assange has been detained at the high-security Belmarsh Prison in south London. A lower court denied the US plea to extradite Assange in January, citing worries about his mental health and the potential that the extraordinarily restrictive conditions of US jails would drive him to commit suicide.

"That risk is in our judgement avoided by the assurances which are supplied (by the US authorities)," Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett of Maldon stated in his Friday judgement. According to US lawyers, Assange will be permitted to return to Australia, where he was born, to spend whatever prison sentence he may get.

The case was sent back to the Westminster Magistrates' Court for a district judge to formally transmit it to British Home Secretary Priti Patel, who supervises law enforcement in the UK and will make the final decision on whether or not to extradite Assange.

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