The incarcerated founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has been granted permission to marry his partner, Stella Moris, at Belmarsh prison in the UK.
The couple received permission to marry inside the high-security prison where Mr. Assange has been lodged since 2019 after the US took legal action to extradite him.
“Mr. Assange’s application was received, considered, and processed in the usual way by the prison governor, as for any other prisoner,” a Prison Service spokesperson was quoted as saying by the Associated Press on Thursday.
Ms. Moris told the PA news agency: “I am relieved that reason prevailed and I hope there will be no further interference with our marriage.”
Assange, 50, met his future wife in 2011, while he was living in the Ecuadorean embassy in the capital.
Ms. Moris is a South Africa-born lawyer and was on his legal team. She has been in a relationship with him since 2015 and has been fighting for him to be released on bail.
The couple got engaged in 2017 and have two children, Max, two, and four-year-old Gabriel, both of whom are British citizens.
Mr. Assange has continued to fight a long-drawn-out legal battle to avoid extradition to the US, where he could be questioned over the activities of WikiLeaks.
He is facing 17 charges of espionage over his role in obtaining and disclosing national defence information following WikiLeaks’s publication of thousands of documents relating to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
The leaked documents included footage from April 2010 that showed US soldiers shooting and killing civilians from a helicopter in Iraq.
If found guilty he could face up to 175 years in prison.
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