Julian Assange was denied permission on Monday to appeal to the UK Supreme Court against moves to extradite him to the United States, where he could face life in prison.
Washington wants to prosecute the WikiLeaks founder over the publication of 500,000 secret military files related to the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He initially won a relief for not sending him to trial, on the grounds that he was a suicide risk if he was held in solitary confinement in a maximum-security US facility.
But US government lawyers appealed, and overturned the lower court’s decision, adding to the legal challenges.
In January, two judges allowed the 50-year-old Australian publisher to apply to the country’s highest court on “points of law of general public importance”.
But a spokesman for the court said: “The Supreme Court has refused permission to appeal … because the application did not raise a cogent point of law”.
She said: “The parties were notified this afternoon.”
WikiLeaks wrote on its Twitter account: “The matter now goes to @UKHomeSecretary Priti Patel to authorize extradition.”
The long-running affair has become one of the reasons for media freedom, with Assange supporters accusing Washington of trying to suppress reporting of legitimate security concerns.
Assange wanted to face trial in 2010 for violating the US Espionage Act by publishing military and diplomatic files.
If convicted, he could face up to 175 years in prison, although the exact sentence is difficult to estimate.
He has been remanded in a top-security prison in south-east London since 2019 for jumping off bail in a previous case alleging sexual assault in Sweden.
That case was dropped but he was not released from prison on the grounds that he was a flight risk in a US extradition case.
Assange’s fiancee Stella Morris, a former member of his legal team who is the mother of his two young sons, announced over the weekend that the couple would marry on March 23.
The UK authorities had previously allowed the couple to marry at Belmarsh Prison.
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