The doctor believes that the “cumulative severity of the pain and suffering inflicted on Mr. Assange—both physical and psychological—is in violation of the 1984 Convention Against Torture.”

A member of a team of physicians that has evaluated Julian Assange’s medical and psychological condition over the past two years told three international human rights groups that the Wikileaks founder has sustained “negative psychological and physical effects” from his seven-year detention in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Motherboard has learned.

From 2012 until last week, Assange had been detained in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Over the last decade—including while Assange was in the embassy—Wikileaks played an important and often controversial role in publishing documents in full, which include the Iraq War cables as well as emails belonging to former Hillary Clinton chief of staff John Podesta in the lead-up to the 2016 election. Last week, Assange was expelled from the Ecuadorian embassy and taken into custody by British authorities—the United States is seeking to extradite him. The United Nations's Special Rapporteur on Torture had been scheduled to meet with Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy on April 25th.

Crosby said she could not speak to Motherboard for this article; Love told Motherboard at an in-person meeting that he believes Crosby will testify on behalf of Assange’s defense in legal proceedings relating to his arrest for allegedly conspiring with Chelsea Manning to obtain classified US military cables from the Iraq War.

Motherboard obtained the letters from her colleague, Sean Love, a doctor at Johns Hopkins who began a project to evaluate the effects of Assange’s detainment on his health in 2017 and recruited Crosby and British psychologist Brock Chisholm to perform the evaluations. Love said that the team obtained permission from Wikileaks and Assange to publish the letters in full .

In the last two months, the doctor, Sondra Crosby, has written letters to former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights , and to the Organization of American States detailing the four evaluations she made of Assange between October 2017 and February 2019. Crosby, who specializes in refugee health and forensic medicine at Boston University and has examined nearly 1,000 torture survivors, wrote that the conditions of Assange’s confinement had “become observably worse since [her] initial visit.”

Specifically, Crosby said she believes that Assange’s treatment was in violation of Articles 1 and 16 of the United Nations’s Convention Against Torture, which defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person” for political reasons. Love told Motherboard that he agreed with Crosby's assessment.

“Any attempt to destabilise is a reprehensible act for Ecuador, because we are a sovereign nation and respectful of the politics of each country,” he said.

Motherboard has not independently confirmed the findings Crosby sent to the human rights groups, and Wikileaks did not respond to a request for comment. The Ecuadorian embassy in London did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Ecuadorian president Lenin Moreno told the press that Assange had turned the embassy into a “center for spying.”

“Mr Assange has suffered a number of serious deleterious effects of sunlight deprivation over the nearly 7 years of confinement,” she wrote, adding that he has a potentially deadly dental condition that needs immediate surgery. “The severe daily pain endured by Mr. Assange from this dental condition is inhumane, notwithstanding that the situation could be life threatening if left untreated.”

In her letter to the human rights groups, Crosby wrote that Assange has “multiple medical conditions” as a result of his confinement and that Assange’s “position [was] worse than a conventional prison in many respects.”

Love, who has medically evaluated people seeking asylum in the United States, told Motherboard that “it’s under-appreciated—the health effects of having stayed in the embassy for seven years without access to daylight and appropriate medical care for that time period. It’s not so simple that he’s out, he’s in the UK court and prison system and going to receive the care he needs and he’s going to be OK ... there are lingering, enduring consequences.”

Love was initially interested in evaluating Assange to study the “consequences of prolonged, arbitrary detention” on Assange’s health. Love recruited Crosby and Chisholm to actually perform the evaluations, though he has stayed involved in the process throughout.

“Initially, I was thinking about writing an academic piece about that topic with potential generalizability to other asylees and asylum seekers,” he said. “In the process of doing the research, we quickly learned his situation is incredibly unique and not well-generalizable to other groups or other individuals.”

Chisholm told me that Assange’s mental stressors came largely as a result of the fact that he didn’t know when or if he would ever get out of the embassy—or if he would be kicked out and arrested.