Hear
SYDNEY/WASHINGTON.- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will plead guilty Wednesday to violating the US espionage law, in an agreement that will put an end to his imprisonment in the United Kingdom and will allow him to return to his country, Australia, ending a 14-year legal odyssey.
Assange, 52, agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal charge of conspiracy to obtain and disclose classified United States national defense documents, according to documents filed in the United States District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
The agreement marks the end of a legal saga in which Assange He spent years in a high-security British prison and the Ecuadorian embassy in London and fought accusations of sexual crimes in Sweden, while resisting extradition to the United States, where he faced 18 criminal charges.
Considered a villain by the United States for endangering classified sources, he has been hailed as a hero by press freedom advocates for exposing wrongdoing and alleged war crimes.
On Wednesday at 9 a.m. local time (Tuesday 20 in Argentina), in a hearing held in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, he will be sentenced to 62 months in prison already served. The US territory in the Pacific was chosen because to Assange’s opposition to traveling to the continental United States and its proximity to Australia, prosecutors said.
Assange left Belmarsh prison in the UK on Monday before being released on bail by the UK High Court. and board a flight that same afternoon, Wikileaks said in a statement published on the social network X.
“This is the result of a global campaign involving grassroots organizers, press freedom advocates, members of parliament and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations,” the statement said.
A video posted on
The plane I was traveling on landed in Bangkok on Tuesday to refuel before transferring the WikiLeaks founder to the Northern Mariana Islands.
Assange will return to Australia after the hearing, according to the Wikileaks statement.
“Julian is free!!!!”, said his wife, Stella Assange in a post on X. “Words cannot express our immense gratitude to YOU…yes, YOU who have mobilized for years and years to make this a reality.”
Assange, 52, “He will be a free man once the agreement is ratified by the judge,” the wife of the WikiLeaks founder told BBC Radio from Australia.
“We weren’t really sure until the last 24 hours that this was actually happening,” Stella Assange said. “The important thing here is that the agreement implied time served that, if he signed it, he could be free,” she explained.
“The priority now is for Julián to recover his health,” said the 40-year-old, South African-born lawyer, with whom the WikiLeaks founder has two children.
The Australian government, headed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been pushing for Assange’s release but declined to comment on the legal proceedings as they were ongoing.
“Regardless of the opinions people have about Mr. Assange (and) his activities, the case has dragged on too long”Albanese said in the country’s Parliament. “There is nothing to be gained by keeping him incarcerated and we want him to return home to Australia.”
In 2010, WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents about Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. – the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history – along with swaths of diplomatic cables.
Assange was accused during the government of donald trump for the massive publication of secret American documents by WikiLeaks, which were leaked by Chelsea Manning a former US military intelligence analyst who was also prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
The more than 700,000 documents included diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts, such as a 2007 video of a U.S. Apache helicopter firing on suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people, including two Reuters news staff. That video was made public in 2010.
The charges against Assange sparked outrage among his many supporters around the world, who have long argued that Assange, as editor of WikiLeaks, should not face charges commonly used against federal government employees who steal or leak. information.
Many press freedom advocates have argued that criminally charging Assange represents a threat to freedom of expression.
“While we welcome the end of his detention, the US pursuit of Assange has set a damaging legal precedent by opening the way for journalists to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act if they receive classified material from informants.” said Jodie Ginsberg, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Assange was arrested for the first time in the United Kingdom in 2010 under a European arrest warrant after Swedish authorities said they wanted to question him over allegations of sexual crimes that were later dropped. He fled to the Ecuadorian embassy, where he remained for seven years, to avoid his extradition to Sweden.
He was dragged out of the embassy in 2019 and Jailed for jumping bail. Since then it was in London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison, from where he has been fighting extradition to the United States for almost five years.
Those five years of confinement are similar to the sentence imposed on Reality Winner, an Air Force veteran and former intelligence contractor, sentenced to 63 months after stealing classified material and mailing it to a media outlet.
Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years, but President Barack Obama reduced the sentence to seven years, saying her sentence was disproportionate to those received by other leakers.
Agencies Reuters and AFP
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