Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today has blurred the line between her professional and personal life in an utterly transformative way.

Stella Morris was a young lawyer raised in Southern Africa, a gifted linguist with a strong commitment to human rights,

who was recruited to the legal team assembled

to help Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, a decade ago. Assange was wanted for questioning

in Sweden about allegations of sexual assault. He claimed those allegations were nothing but a trap,

designed to enable the Americans to get their hands on him in retribution for his release of a treasure trove of leaked confidential material from the US government. In 2012, he sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Stella Morris was a frequent visitor. By her account, they fell in love. In 2017,

she gave birth to a son, fathered by Assange. She had a second son with him in 2019. By then,

Assange was in Belmarsh Prison, having been forcibly removed from his embassy refuge. He's still there today,

awaiting a decision from the British Home Secretary on whether he should be extradited to face

espionage charges in the US, charges which could see him locked up for the rest of his life.

To his supporters, Assange is a heroic, journalistic defender of the right to speak truth to power.

To his enemies, he's a self-indulgent, irresponsible danger to the security of Western democracy.

He is a polarizing figure, even for those who know him best. Why? Well, Stella Morris joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk.

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to have you in the studio. Over the next few days,

the British Home Secretary, Pretty Patel, is going to make a very big decision on whether

to extradite your husband, Julian Assange, to the United States. Does this feel

to you like his last chance? Well, indeed, Prudipatel has my husband's life in her hands.

We have some avenues of appeal still to go, but ultimately, over the last few years, over the last 12 years, in fact, what has

happened is a flagrant abuse of the legal system in order to persecute a publisher for

publishing the truth about the US and its conduct of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, conducting torture in Wantanamo Bay, and so on.

This is a political persecution. It's a political case.

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