Their request was made with mere weeks remaining until a British court decides whether to grant a request by the U.S. government to extradite Mr. Assange so that he can stand trial in Alexandria, Virginia. Mr. Assange, 49, an Australian, faces charges in the U.S. related to WikiLeaks, the secret-spilling site he started, and possibly decades in prison convicted of all counts. He was arrested in April 2019 inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and he remains jailed on remand at a nearby prison while awaiting a determination on the U.S. extradition request. The parliamentarians do not explicitly condone Mr. Assange in the letter. But they do echo his defense that he acted as a journalist by releasing through WikiLeaks reams of secret material embarrassing to the U.S.