The hearing at London's Woolwich Crown Court will not decide if Assange is guilty of any wrongdoing, but whether the extradition request meets the requirements set out under a 2003 UK-U.S. treaty, which critics say is stacked in favour of the United States.
Baraitser has agreed that the case will get under way next week before being postponed until May 18 when it will resume again for a further three weeks to allow both sides more time to gather evidence.
Assange's lawyers have said in preliminary hearings that they would argue he was being sought for political offences and that the treaty banned extradition on these grounds.
Trump offered to pardon Assange if he said that Russia had nothing to do with WikiLeaks’ publication of Democratic Party emails in 2016, his lawyer told a London court this week. The White House dismissed the accusation.
Other arguments would feature medical evidence, public denunciations by leading U.S. political figures and details from the case of Chelsea Manning, an ex-intelligence analyst who was convicted by a U.S. Army court-martial in 2013 of espionage and other offences for leaking secret cables to WikiLeaks.
Assange's legal team are planning to call up to 21 witnesses as part of his defence.
In 2012, Assange took refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden where he was accused of sex crimes which he denied and which were later dropped, saying he feared he would ultimately be sent on to the United Sates.
After seven years, he was dragged from the embassy in 2019 and then jailed for 50 weeks for skipping bail. He has remained in prison ever since, after the United States launched its extradition request.
If the judge decides Assange should be extradited, the decision needs to be rubber-stamped by Home Secretary (interior minister) Priti Patel although he will have the right to appeal to London's High Court and then possibly to the Supreme Court, Britain's top judicial body.
