LONDON (AP) — A British judge on Monday rejected the United States’ request to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to face espionage charges over the publication of secret U.S. documents a decade ago, saying he was likely to kill himself if held under harsh U.S. prison conditions.

In a mixed ruling for Assange and his supporters, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser rejected defense arguments that the 49-year-old Australian faces a politically motivated American prosecution that rides roughshod over free-speech protections. But she said Assange’s precarious mental health would likely deteriorate further under the conditions of “near total isolation” he would face in a U.S. prison.

“I find that the mental condition of Mr. Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America,” the judge said.

Lawyers for the U.S. government said they would appeal the decision, and the U.S. Department of Justice said it would continue to seek Assange’s extradition.

“While we are extremely disappointed in the court’s ultimate decision, we are gratified that the United States prevailed on every point of law raised,” it said in a statement. “In particular, the court rejected all of Mr. Assange’s arguments regarding political motivation, political offense, fair trial and freedom of speech.”

Assange’s lawyers said they would ask for his release from a London prison where he has been held for more than a 18 months at a bail hearing on Wednesday.

Assange, who sat quietly in the dock at London’s Central Criminal Court for the ruling, wiped his brow as the decision was announced. His partner Stella Moris, with whom he has two young sons, wept.

Outside court, Moris said the ruling was “the first step towards justice,” but it was not yet time to celebrate.

“I had hoped that today would be the day that Julian would come home,” she said. “Today is not that day, but that day will come soon.”

The ruling marked a dramatic moment in Assange’s long legal battles in Britain — though likely not its final chapter.

It’s unclear whether the incoming Biden administration will pursue the prosecution, initiated under President Donald Trump.

Assange’s American lawyer, Barry Pollack, said the legal team was “enormously gratified” by the British court’s decision.

“We hope that after consideration of the U.K. court’s ruling, the United States will decide not to pursue the case further,” he said.

Moris urged Trump to pardon Assange before he leaves office this month.

“Mr. President, tear down these prison walls,” she said. “Let our little boys have their father.”

U.S. prosecutors have indicted Assange on 17 espionage charges and one charge of computer misuse over WikiLeaks’ publication of thousands of leaked military and diplomatic documents. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison.

Lawyers for Assange argue that he was acting as a journalist and is entitled to First Amendment protections of freedom of speech for publishing documents that exposed U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lawyers for the U.S. government denied that Assange was being prosecuted merely for publishing, saying the case “is in large part based upon his unlawful involvement” in the theft of the diplomatic cables and military files by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.

The British judge sided with U.S. lawyers on that score, saying Assange’s actions, if proven, would amount to offenses “that would not be protected by his right to freedom of speech.” She also said the U.S. judicial system would give him a fair trial.

The defense also argued during a three-week hearing in the fall that Assange risked “a grossly disproportionate sentence” and detention in “draconian and inhumane conditions” if he was sent to the United States.

The judge agreed that U.S. prison conditions would be oppressive, saying there was a “real risk” he would be sent to the Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado. It is the highest security prison in the U.S., also holding Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski and Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

She accepted evidence from expert witnesses that Assange had a depressive disorder and an autism spectrum disorder.

“I am satisfied that, in these harsh conditions, Mr. Assange’s mental health would deteriorate, causing him to commit suicide with the single minded determination of his autism spectrum disorder,” the judge said.

She said Assange was “a depressed and sometimes despairing man” who had the “intellect and determination” to circumvent any suicide prevention measures taken by American prison authorities.

Britain’s extradition agreement with the U.S. says that extradition can be blocked if “by reason of the person’s mental or physical condition, it would be unjust or oppressive to extradite him.”

This is not the first time the U.K. has refused extradition to the United States on those grounds.

In 2018, a British court refused to extradite Lauri Love, a hacker accused of penetrating U.S. government networks, because of the risk he would kill himself. In 2012 then-Home Secretary Theresa May blocked the extradition of Gary McKinnon, who was accused of breaking into U.S. military and space networks, because of the risk he would end his life.

The prosecution of Assange has been condemned by journalists and human rights groups, who say it undermines free speech and imperils journalists. They welcomed the judge’s decision, even though it was not made on free-speech grounds.

“This is a huge relief to anyone who cares about the rights of journalists,” The Freedom of the Press Foundation tweeted.

Assange’s legal troubles began in 2010, when he was arrested in London at the request of Sweden, which wanted to question him about allegations of rape and sexual assault made by two women. In 2012, Assange jumped bail and sought refuge inside the Ecuadorian Embassy, where he was beyond the reach of U.K. and Swedish authorities — but also effectively was a prisoner, unable to leave the tiny diplomatic space in London’s tony Knightsbridge area.

The relationship between Assange and his hosts eventually soured, and he was evicted from the embassy in April 2019. British police immediately arrested him for breaching bail in 2012.

Sweden dropped the sex crimes investigations in November 2019 because so much time had elapsed, but Assange has remained in London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison throughout his extradition hearing.

ATLANTA (AP) — For more than four years, President Donald Trump has dominated the Republican Party and the whole of American politics. Now Georgia gets to decide what comes next.

Two Senate runoffs on Tuesday, just 15 days before Trump leaves office, will not only determine which party controls the Senate but offer the first clues about how long Trump can maintain his grip on the nation’s politics once he’s out of the White House.

Democrats are looking to prove that President-elect Joe Biden’s win in Georgia and nationally was not just a Trump backlash, but a permanent shift for a once-solidly Republican state. Their candidates, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, have pushed to solidify Democratic gains among young voters in urban areas and younger suburbanites around Atlanta, along with strong Black turnout.

For Republicans, who’ve watched David Perdue and Sen. Kelly Loeffler run as Trump loyalists, the question is how long embracing the president’s disruptive politics — even indulging his demands that elections officials defy the law to overturn his defeat — can deliver victories in battlegrounds.

“The party has a real choice to make on where we go from here,” said Michael McNeely, a former Georgia Republican vice chairman. “Either candidates or those already in office are going to say, hey, we’re going to move beyond the Trump presidency or we’re going to continue to take our lead from President Trump, or former President Trump.”

Republicans need to win just one of the two seats on the ballot to maintain Senate control. Democrats need to win both for a 50-50 split that would make Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, as the Senate’s presiding officer, the tie-breaking vote. The stakes are high enough that Biden and Trump are scheduled to hold dueling rallies Monday in Georgia. Harris was in the state Sunday.

Loeffler, an appointee in her first campaign, and Perdue, who’s trying to win a second term after his first expired Sunday, chose a strategy that worked for several of their GOP colleagues who won hotly contested races in November.

Trump fueled Republican turnout, especially in rural areas and small towns, that overwhelmed Democrats in states less diverse than Georgia. If the trend holds for Perdue or Loeffler, Republicans would owe their majority in large measure to Trump’s success in drawing out voters who had previously tuned out.

But Democratic victories would leave Republicans to reckon more directly with Trump’s rise and fall. The worst-case scenario for Republicans would be Ossoff and Warnock capitalizing again in Atlanta suburbs, while watching rural and small-town turnout drop from November, when Trump was on the ballot.

Those growing, diversifying suburbs, which not long ago ensured statewide GOP victories, have trended toward Democrats in the Trump era not just in Georgia, but in metro areas such as Philadelphia, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix.

Trump has shown since November that he has no intention of going quietly. He’s repeatedly denied defeat and in a telephone call over the weekend to Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, demanded that he “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory.

That call, a recording of which was obtained by The Associated Press, demonstrates what Perdue and Loeffler have faced — and chosen to embrace. Both are wealthy business figures who came to politics from the center-right faction of the U.S. establishment, rather than the more populist throng that propelled Trump. But Perdue and Loeffler have defined their Washington tenures by how closely they align with a president who remade Republicanism in his image.

“I stood by the president 100% of the time. I’m proud to do that,” Loeffler said in one of her closing interviews on Fox News.

As Trump railed in November about election fraud that even his then-attorney general said didn’t happen, Perdue and Loeffler called for Raffensperger to resign. Raffensperger instead presided over multiple counts that left Biden as the winner in Georgia by about 12,000 votes out of 5 million cast. The senators also never defended Gov. Brian Kemp as Trump belittled him as “incompetent” and called for his resignation, less than three years after the president endorsed Kemp in a contentious GOP primary.

Plenty of Georgia Republicans embrace Trump’s imprint, at least publicly.

“Trump got a whole lot of people off the bench,” said former U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, a Trump ally, in a recent interview. “He appealed to disenfranchised, disaffected voters. With him gone, it’s a different ballgame and that’s what Republicans, starting with David and Kelly, are trying to replicate.”

Trump received about 385,000 more votes in Georgia than he did four years ago. It was part of a national uptick to 74 million votes, the second-highest presidential popular vote total in history. Biden, though, set the record with 81 million, and his Georgia total was about 600,000 ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 mark.

The president’s brand is even more risk-and-reward in Georgia because of how the two parties’ votes are distributed: Democratic-trending metro areas are growing while rural pockets and small towns — Trump’s core — mostly are not. The suburbs between are shifting as they become less white and as younger white Georgians, whether native or transplant, trend less conservative.

Linda Graham, a 52-year-old Republican, explained the landscape as she greeted canvassers last month from the conservative Americans for Prosperity. “Absolutely four Republican votes in this house,” she said, including her young adult children casting absentee ballots. But as she looked around her cul-de-sac, she named the more recent arrivals with much younger children still at home.

“I love ’em, but they’re Democrats,” Graham said. “They’re not old enough for it to have affected their money, I guess,” she mused.

Early vote turnout is adding to GOP concerns. Three million voters have already cast ballots, a record showing for a Georgia runoff. Total early vote for the general election was 3.6 million.

According to Ryan Anderson, a nonpartisan data analyst in Atlanta, early turnout in Democratic congressional districts outpaces Republican districts when compared to the November election. There are still at least 300,000 absentee ballots outstanding.

Only three of Georgia’s 14 House districts have hit 80% of the fall early vote total. But all three are Democratic districts, and they include the two most concentrated Democratic districts, the 4th and 5th in the metro Atlanta core.

The lowest-performing Democratic district has a 74.8% mark compared to November, but that’s still higher than five of Georgia’s eight Republican districts. And in one of Republicans’ two most concentrated districts, early turnout is only 69.2% of what it was in the general election.