WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is due to plead guilty on Wednesday to violating US espionage law. The deal will set him free after a 14-year British legal odyssey and allow his return home to Australia.
Assange, 52, has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents.
Assange spent more than five years in a British high-security jail and seven holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He fought accusations of sex crimes in Sweden and battled extradition to the US, where he faced 18 criminal charges.
The American government viewed him as a reckless villain who had endangered the lives of agents through WikiLeaks’ mass release of secret US documents.
The most controversial leaks by WikiLeaks featured classified US military documents and videos from the war it waged in Iran and Afghanistan in the early to mid 2000s that it said highlighted issues such as abuse of prisoners in US custody, human rights violations and civilian deaths.
To free press advocates and his supporters, which included world leaders, celebrities and some prominent journalists, he is a hero for exposing wrongdoing and alleged war crimes. They believe he was persecuted for embarrassing the US authorities.
Journalists dying in Israel-Gaza war shows need to protect them
Australian support
On Wednesday, Assange is due to be sentenced to 62 months of time already served at a hearing in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands. The US territory in the Pacific was chosen due to Assange’s opposition to travelling to the mainland US and for its proximity to Australia, prosecutors said.
Assange will return to Australia after the hearing, a WikiLeaks statement said.
The Australian government, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, has been pressing US President Joe Biden for Assange’s release.
“Regardless of the views that people have about Mr Assange [and] his activities, the case has dragged on for too long,” Albanese said in the country’s parliament.
“There is nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration and we want him brought home to Australia.”
The backstory
WikiLeaks came to prominence in 2010 after it released hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq along with swathes of diplomatic cables.
Assange was indicted during former President Donald Trump’s administration over the release of the documents. They were leaked by Chelsea Manning, a former US military intelligence analyst who was also prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but President Barack Obama reduced the term to seven, saying her sentence was disproportionate to those received by other leakers.
The trove of more than 700,000 documents included diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts. These included a 2007 video of a US Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people including two Reuters news staff.
The charges against Assange sparked outrage among his many global supporters who have long argued that Assange as the publisher of WikiLeaks should not face charges typically used against federal government employees who steal or leak information.
Many press freedom advocates have argued that criminally charging Assange represents a threat to free speech and journalism.
Swedish allegations
Assange was first arrested in Britain in 2010 on a European arrest warrant after Swedish authorities said they wanted to question him over sex-crime allegations that were later dropped. He fled to Ecuador’s embassy, where he remained for seven years, to avoid extradition to Sweden.
He was dragged out of the embassy in 2019, jailed for skipping bail and has been in Belmarsh ever since, latterly fighting extradition to the United States.
“Millions of people who have been advocating for Julian, it is almost time for them to have a drink and a celebration,” his brother Gabriel said.
