LONDON, April 4. /TASS/. Representatives of Reporters Without Borders have been denied access to visit Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in London’s Belmarsh Prison, WikiLeaks said on Tuesday.

"Representatives of Reporters Without Borders denied access to visit Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison this morning, despite official permission having been granted," WikiLeaks said on Twitter.

The upcoming meeting of Reporters Without Borders representatives with Assange at the prison was announced on Monday by Rebecca Vincent, one of the organization’s leaders.

Assange was taken into custody and placed in Belmarsh after he was expelled from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in April 2019. For more than three years, Washington has been seeking his extradition to the United States, but Assange's defense is making attempts to prevent that from happening. Last November, his lawyers appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in an attempt to block his extradition to the United States.

The US has charged the 51-year-old Australian with crimes related to the largest case of disclosure of classified information in the US history. Cumulatively, if found guilty on these charges, he faces 175 years in prison. In November, leading Western publications, including the New York Times, the Guardian, the Times, Le Monde and Pais, called on the US to drop the charges against Assange.