Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn declined to attend a state dinner at Buckingham Palace in honor of Donald Trump. | Tolga Akmen, AFP via Getty Images UK’s Labour urges government to block Assange extradition Labour cites case of hacker Gary McKinnon, whose extradition to the US was blocked by the UK government on human rights grounds.

The U.K.'s opposition Labour Party called on the government to block the extradition of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the United States, where he faces up to five years in prison for a computer hacking charge.

Assange was arrested Thursday at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had been holed up for seven years after breaking his bail to avoid extradition to Sweden over sexual assault allegations, which have since been dropped.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn tweeted late Thursday that Assange should not be extradited to the U.S., saying he had exposed evidence of U.S. military atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The U.S. government has charged Assange with "conspiring to commit computer intrusion" over a huge dump of classified information in 2010-2011.

On Friday, the party's Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott told the BBC's Today program that there "may be human rights grounds" to reject the extradition request.

"He was a whistleblower ... and I think there may be human rights issues related to Assange," Abbott said. "Much of the information he brought into the public domain, it could be argued, was very much in the public interest."

She added: "We all know what this is about. It's not the [Swedish] rape charges, serious as they are, it is about the Wikileaks and all of that embarrassing information about the activities of the American military and security services."

Abbott cited as a precedent the case of Gary McKinnon, a Briton who was accused of hacking into U.S. military computers in 2001-2002. After a lengthy legal process, the U.K.'s then-Home Secretary Theresa May blocked McKinnon's extradition to the U.S. — where he faced a jail term of up to 70 years — on human rights grounds, given his medical condition.

"McKinnon's real crime was to have embarrassed the U.S. military and security services," Abbott said.

"If the Swedish government wants to come forward with those [rape] charges, I believe Assange should face the criminal justice system, but if you're talking about the American extradition attempt, which is less about the threat he poses to security in America and more about the embarrassment of the things he has revealed about the American military and security services, we would say... we should block the extradition."

Assange faces up to a year in jail in the U.K. for breaking his bail conditions.

May, now prime minister, said Thursday that Assange's arrest shows that "no one is above the law."