The political offenses exception is not ambiguous. It's well understood what the exception means, and the treaty explicitly bars it. It's just very strange to me that the US and UK explicitly agreed to arrange for extradition on certain terms, but that those terms are now deemed by this judge not to apply in the UK.
> But treaty law cannot establish domestic laws that govern things like extradition
In the US, treaties are law. The political offense exception absolutely applies when extraditing people from the US to the UK.
There are enough other problems in this ruling to make me very skeptical of the judge's reasoning here. A few of them:
* The judge says that it's an open question whether or not a journalist from The Guardian was the person who first published unredacted cables with informants' names. As was established beyond any doubt, it was The Guardian's journalist who first published the cables. The decryption key was the title of a chapter in his book, for crying out loud, and the encrypted archive was available online. Yet Baraitser treats this as an open question. Doing so allows Baraitser to argue that Assange put people's lives at risk.
* The judge asserts that Pompeo's statements about going after Assange do not represent the views of the US government, and therefore cannot be used to argue that the prosecution is politically motivated. Pompeo is the former director of the CIA and the current Secretary of State. He's one of the most senior members of the government, and he gave an entire speech devoted to arguing that the government should go after Assange.
To me, these are just unbelievable statements by the judge. The bottom line, though, is that the judge's ruling makes it possible for the US to go after investigative journalists in the UK who publish about the US military or intelligence apparatus. All the protections that journalists thought they had do not exist.