07:35 PM
Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, This Wednesday he resumed his life in freedom in Australiaafter plead guilty to revealing defense secrets within the framework of an agreement with the United States justice system, which allowed an end to almost 14 years of legal battle.
Assange landed at night in Canberra, the capital of his native countryon a private jet, after spending the last five years in a high-security prison in the United Kingdom.
Upon leaving the plane, wearing a black suit and an ocher tie, He raised his fist and crossed the court to hug his wife Stella and his father.before the eyes of dozens of journalists.
“I ask you please to give us space, to give us privacy, to find our place, to let our family be a family before he can speak again at the time I choose,” said Assange’s wife, who left the room, without making any statements.
The Australian, accused of espionage, was declared a “free man” for the justice of the United States.
“You can walk out of this courtroom a free man,” Judge Ramona V. Manglona said at the end of a quick hearing in the federal court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory.
However, Assange will not be able to travel to the United States without authorization, the Department of Justice indicated in a statement.
Under the agreement, the 52-year-old former hacker, accused of having published hundreds of thousands of confidential US documents in the 2010s, pleaded guilty to obtaining and disseminating national defense information.
“I encouraged my source to provide classified material,” he declared, referring to US soldier Chelsea Manning, who leaked the information.
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Assange’s revelations put people in “danger”, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller declared in Washington.
The information “identified people in contact with the State Department, including opposition leaders” and “human rights activists from around the world,” he added.
“Today is a historic day. Ends 14 years of legal battles“, including seven years of confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, said one of his lawyers, Jennifer Robinson.
Suffering
Assange “suffered enormously for his fight for freedom of expression, freedom of the press,” said Barry Pollack, another of his lawyers.
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Former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who was Assange’s lawyer, celebrated that “he can finally be a free man.”
“The important thing is that he is free, it may be that later his lawyers will analyze other possibilities, because “What has been done with Julian Assange is criminal,” former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa told AFP. who had granted Assange asylum in the London embassy in 2012.
Assange left the United Kingdom on Monday, where he had been imprisoned for five years, after agreeing to plead guilty before the United States justice system.
The agreement involved charging him with a single charge, “conspiracy to obtain and disclose information related to national defense”, for which He was sentenced to 62 months of prison, a sentence that has already been served with the five years he spent in preventive detention.
The British government had approved his extradition to the United States in June 2022, But on May 20, the court granted him the right to appeal in a hearing scheduled for July 9 and 10.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed that “all kinds of people” recently made visits to the United States and helped close the deal.
Assange was accused of have disclosed as of 2010 more than 700,000 confidential documents on US military and diplomatic activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other countries.
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The initial accusations made him liable to up to 175 years in prison, under the Espionage Act.
The founder of WikiLeaks He was arrested by the British police in April 2019, after spending seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy. to avoid his extradition to Sweden in a rape investigation, ultimately dismissed.
