British court near landmark ruling in extradition case over Lauri Love, alleged hacker

Lauri Love, a British man with Asperger’s Syndrome accused of hacking U.S. agencies including the Federal Reserve, NASA and Army, said he’ll learn next week whether he successfully challenged an American extradition request, testing for the first time legal protections afforded to U.K. citizens by the so-called “forum bar” introduced in 2013 following a similar bilateral squabble.

The U.K. High Court in London will rule Monday, Feb. 5, on an extradition appeal brought by Mr. Love, 33, he and his legal defense team announced Friday, potentially resolving an international dispute spurred by a series of computer hacks he’s accused of committing during a span that started over five years earlier.

Federal prosecutors alleged that Mr. Love breached several government agencies and private firms during a hacking spree that started in late 2012 and included a handful of attacks attributed to the hacktivist collective Anonymous, ranging from intrusions suffered by the U.S. Sentencing Commission and the FBI’s Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory, to the Missile Defense Agency and Department of Health and Human Services, among others.

Mr. Love risks spending decades behind bars if he’s sent abroad and convicted in court, but he’s challenged the extradition request on humanitarian grounds, citing the forum bar law meant to protect vulnerable British defendants capable of being tried at home.

Introduced by current Prime Minister Theresa May during her stint as home secretary, the forum bar allows the High Court to halt extraditions where doing so is in the “interests of justice.” It was passed following a similar dispute between the U.S. over Gary McKinnon, a prolific computer hacker also diagnosed with Asperger’s and depression, albeit after more than a decade of extradition proceedings brought by the Justice Department.

Mr. Love has been diagnosed Asperger’s, depression and drug-resistant eczema, and he previously said he’d commit suicide before surrendering to U.S. authorities and effectively putting his health in their hands.

A district judge at Westminster Magistrates’ Court ruled in 2016 that Mr. Love could be extradited to the U.S., prompting the appeal slated to be decided Monday by two judges of the U.K. High Court, Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett and Justice Duncan Ouseley, the U.K.’s East Anglian Daily Times reported Friday.

“This is an incredibly important case,” said Naomi Colvin of the Courage Foundation, a trust that fundraises legal defenses for Mr. Love and other accused hacktivists. “What happens on Monday will determine whether the hard-fought-for changes to our extradition law, secured during the Gary McKinnon law case, hold true or whether we are back to square one again,” she told Computer Weekly.

“It’s over four years of incredible stress, and it’s a deleterious impact on his mental and physical health. To do this to someone who has medical difficulties, it’s a form of punishment, but it’s a form of punishment by process.”

Defense attorney Edward Fitzgerald previously said there were “overwhelming reasons of justice and humanity” for Mr. Love to be tried locally, and he argued that extraditing his client would be “unjust and oppressive,” Daily Times reported.

Peter Caldwell, an attorney for the Justice Department, said the district court judge had she “properly assessed” Mr. Love’s condition before authorizing his appeal in 2016, the report said.

Mr. Love’s attorneys plan to appeal further if they lose Monday’s hearing, Ms. Colvin said.

“Due to the public importance of this case, it could easily go to the Supreme Court,” she told Computer Weekly. “Given the deterioration of prison conditions and the rule of law in the U.S. under Trump, it would not be surprising if lawyers in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg wanted to look at it.”

A group of 73 members of U.K. Parliament previously signed their names to a letter asking Mr. Love to be tried in the U.K. instead of being extradited.

Mr. Love declined to comment.