 Alexander please give us your assessment of how the appeal will go and in particular the indisputable parallels or what appear to be indisputable parallels with the Dan Ellsberg prosecution. Will the High Court accept this additional evidence of CIA malfeasance and is it likely to lead to Julian being released? So first of all the High Court has enormous discretion whether they hear new evidence or not and this is new evidence. I think they should certainly hear this new evidence because the evidence that we are hearing about all this information we're getting about what the CIA was up to is first of all directly relevant to the whole question of his extradition and it should have been disclosed by the US authorities at the trial before Britsa. Now to recap the British government Britain does not extradite people to countries where they are at serious risk whether you know life or health or whatever that's well established law that's foundational law. What we now learn is that not only was the government that is now seeking Julian's extradition very persistent in getting him and monitoring him all the time but a powerful agency of that government the Central Intelligence Agency was conducting covert operations against him. They were doing so on the basis that it was his organization was an intelligence agency and they were prepared to go to extraordinary lengths they were prepared to kill him kill other people too and in fact kidnap him or do all of those sort of things. So this says to me that he should absolutely not be extradited to the United States moreover though he should not in theory look at this new evidence at an appeal this evidence was not disclosed to the court by the US authorities which it should have been and therefore for that reason I think it can be and ought to be considered by the court at the forthcoming hearing. I will be very surprised indeed very astonished indeed if there is an application made to consider this evidence and if that application is not granted so we will see what happens as I said they have wide discretion in that field that certainly I think it should be heard and I get to say something else if this extradition request were being made by the government of any other country and this information had come out about what that country was doing in order to get the person whose extradition it was seeking then I have no doubt at all that the British courts would refuse extradition after these revelations it is because of the extraordinary position of the United States that there are these uncertainties and these questions. Thank you very much Alexander are there any other comments you'd like to make in general about the upcoming appeal on any of the other grounds? Yes I mean this is the problematic because what the United States has been allowed to do is to call into question findings by the trial judge about Julian Assange's health and this is really actually very extraordinary and extremely unusual generally when a trial judge makes findings of fact when the trial judge decides to accept evidence of an expert an appeal court does not revisit that question and of course the first judge who in the high court granted the United States permission to appeal on various grounds actually excluded that key question of the admissibility or rather the weight of the evidence of the expert who is now being challenged and I have to say the fact that the appeal court then reversed its position that in a complete turnaround and said well we are going to let the US authorities reconsider this all after all well that shows to my mind the extraordinary lengths to which the British authorities including the British judiciary are prepared to go to accommodate the US in this extradition case I cannot imagine that that would have happened in any other extradition case in honor appeal other than you know one brought by the United States and that's I'm afraid what creates the uncertainty about the whole proceedings if they were prepared to do that with respect to the expert's evidence well one has to worry what else they're going to do with this new evidence that's just appeared you know they might say for example with newspaper gossip we're not going to consider it for that reason even though it's clearly very well founded and my guess is that it's been leaked by people within the US government precisely because some of them are very unhappy about the way in which this extradition has been conducted and about this campaign against Julian Assange and that's I think an important fact that's a separate issue so it makes one very uneasy that we are looking at an appeal on these grounds reversing a decision of the first judge and it makes one uneasy about how they're going to handle everything but of course now with this new evidence it's becoming more difficult for them I would have thought to just disregard all of this close their eyes so you know and you know we don't see all of this evil if you like we're just going to go ahead and extradite him despite all the clear risks to him risks obviously to his health assurances from the US authorities which can't be relied on and of course assurances from a government which is now known one of its key agencies was actually prepared to take extreme steps of kidnapping and if necessary murder so that's that's where we are now I think in this case