The founder of Wikileaks appears before the Mariana Islands court to sign an agreement with the US court that ends a 14-year legal battle. After the hearing, he leaves for Australia The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, pleaded guilty this Wednesday (06/26) to violating the US Espionage Act by disclosing confidential US government documents. The statement is part of an agreement signed between the journalist and the American court and puts an end to a 14-year legal battle.
At the hearing Assange was convicted, but the agreement allowed him to be released. Before a federal court in the Mariana Islands, an American territory in the Pacific Ocean, Assange accepted criminal charges of conspiracy to illegally obtain and disclose classified information. Despite this, according to the American newspaper The Washington Post, he defended his actions.
“When I worked as a journalist, I encouraged my source to provide information that was considered confidential so that I could publish it,” he said.
The hearing was held in the archipelago because of its proximity to Assange’s home country of Australia and the fact that the Wikileaks founder refused to travel to the mainland United States.
The agreement between the US prosecutor’s office and the defense provides for a sentence of 62 months in prison, a period that the Australian has already served while detained in Belmarsh, in the United Kingdom. Assange also agreed to waive his right to appeal and pledged to destroy any confidential information obtained by WikiLeaks.
He appeared in court this Wednesday accompanied by Kevin Rudd, former Australian prime minister and current Australian ambassador to the United States. Shortly after his release, the plane carrying him left for Australia, where he will be able to reunite with his wife and two children.
Assange had been detained in Belmarsh, in the east of the British capital, since 2019. Previously, he had spent seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had taken refuge to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where he had been accused of sexual abuse. -something he has always denied. The Swedish court subsequently dismissed the case.
In Belmarsh, Assange spent 1,901 days, during which, according to the Wikileaks portal, “he was in a 2 x 3 meter cell, isolated 23 hours a day”.
The accusations against Assange
Assange was accused in the United States, along with ex-serviceman Chelsea Manning, Wikileaks’ first major source, of stealing and publishing secret documents related to US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, this would also have put the lives of US informants at risk. In 2010, then US vice-president, now president, Joe Biden, called Assange a “high-tech terrorist”.
One of the most impactful leaked videos showed American soldiers in Baghdad in 2007 shooting at civilians, including journalists.
Assange, however, is not responsible for publishing the complete, unredacted data. In 2010, Wikileaks brought together a group of large media organizations to produce reports on leaked information. The group included the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El Pais. The password to the folder where the documents were located was published in a book by journalists involved in the project. Wikileaks published the information only after it was already public.
The Australian was charged under the Espionage Act, legislation enacted more than a hundred years ago to condemn spies and traitors to the country during the First World War. This law had never been used against journalists. The United States has been trying for years to extradite Assange, charging him with 18 espionage and computer intrusion crimes, and wanted to try him for the disclosure of more than 700,000 secret documents, which could carry a sentence of up to 175 years in prison.
The US government, however, has never presented evidence that anyone suffered harm as a result of the documents’ publication. The United States has argued that Assange is not a journalist and said he was a hacker for publishing the documents without presenting them in context.
Agreement with American justice
Since the documents were leaked in 2010, the United States had sought to extradite Assange and the journalist had faced a legal battle to prevent deportation. Press freedom organizations have been calling for Assange’s release for years, and his wife Stella has campaigned in her defense involving celebrities and political figures.
The agreement reached was not entirely unexpected. President Biden was under pressure to drop the long-running case against Assange. In February the Australian government had presented an official request to this effect and Biden had declared that he would take the issue into consideration, giving hope among the activist’s supporters that a solution could be reached soon.
le/cn (Efe, AFP, Lusa, ots)
Source: Terra
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