 For more videos and people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Julian Assange's extradition hearing has resumed on September 7th at the Central Criminal Court in London, even as protests in support of Assange took place in different cities. There are reports that the remote access of all 40 civil societies and political monitors to attend the hearings has been withdrawn. Assange is currently facing 18 counts of espionage and cybercrime charges in the US over accusations of conspiring with military intelligence officer and whistleblower Chelsea Manning. If convicted, he faces up to 175 years in prison. Assange was arrested in April 2019 from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. At the time of his arrest, he had been in the embassy for seven years where he had been granted asylum in 2012. At that time, he was facing extradition to Sweden on accusations of sexual offences. While on conditional bail, Assange sought asylum at the embassy which was granted by the Ecuadorian government under President Rappel Korea. In 2019, President Lenin Murino revoked the asylum granted to Assange after which he was arrested by the London Metropolitan Police for jumping bail. He was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for this charge. Soon it was revealed that the charge in Sweden was not the real reason for Assange's arrest. The arrest was due to a US Justice Department claim on him. Assange, with the help of Chelsea Manning, has exposed major US war crimes and corruption through WikiLeaks. Thousands of documents and field reports have been published on WikiLeaks on the US war in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as diplomatic cables showing how the US has snooped on different national governments and the UN. But WikiLeaks was not alone in publishing this classified material. The New York Times, The Guardian, etc. also published these documents. The real charge against Assange is that he actively encouraged Manning to provide more information and agreed to crack a password hash stored on US Department of Defense computers. But the US does not have sufficient evidence to prove this, because of this, Manning was asked to testify against Assange before a grand jury. However, she refused and was subsequently arrested in March 2019. She remained in prison till March 2020. This was not her first period of incarceration as she never denied that she provided the classified materials to WikiLeaks. She has spent seven years in prison because of that, from 2010 to 2017. In 2012, the UN special rapporteur on torture Juan E. Mendez criticized the conditions under which Manning was held in the US, stating that the treatment is akin to psychological torture. She had originally been sentenced to 35 years, but after much pressure from civil society groups and advocates, President Barack Obama commuted Manning's sentence in 2017. Meanwhile, Assange's physical and mental health has been steadily deteriorating. United Nations special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of punishment, Nils Melzer wrote that in addition to physical ailments, Mr. Assange showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety, and intense psychological trauma. In March 2020, Assange's lawyers applied for his bail citing the spread of COVID-19 in prisons in the UK. They argued that in case of COVID-19 outbreak at the prison, he would be very vulnerable owing to his weak health, but bail was denied. Through all these events, it has become clear that Assange's case is not a matter of guilt or innocence. There is no clear evidence of him conspiring with Manning, beyond which the only charge that remains is the publishing of sensitive information that hurts US interests. More importantly, those documents shattered the illusion that any humanitarian warfare is being waged by the US. It is clear that the case against Assange is to make him pay for exposing US crimes.