WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with US courts under which he will be freed after years of detention in the UK.
Julian Assange is soon free. The whistleblower, incarcerated since 2019 in a prison in the United Kingdom, reached an agreement with the Biden administration, report several American media, including our colleagues from CNN and NBC.
Concretely, the founder of WikiLeaks reached an agreement to plead guilty with the American Department of Justice. In exchange, he will not be extradited to the United States. On the contrary, American prosecutors will seek a sentence of 62 months, which is equivalent to the time spent by Julian Assange in prison in England, explains CNN.
The agreement would therefore allow Julian Assange to immediately return to Australia, his native country.
“Julian Assange is free”
Pursued by the American authorities for having disclosed hundreds of thousands of confidential documents, the Australian must appear before a federal court in the Mariana Islands, an American territory in the Pacific. He is expected to plead guilty to “conspiracy to obtain and disclose information relating to national defense”, according to court documents made public on the night of Monday June 24 to Tuesday June 25.
According to his organization WikiLeaks, Julian Assange has already left the United Kingdom. “Julian Assange is free,” writes the NGO on social networks.
This agreement, which puts an end to a saga of almost 14 years, comes two weeks before a new crucial hearing before the British courts. This was to examine on July 9 and 10 Julian Assange’s appeal against his extradition to the United States.
He faced up to 175 years in prison
Detained since 2019 in a high security prison in London, he is fighting not to be delivered to American justice, which is pursuing him for having made public from 2010 more than 700,000 confidential documents on American military and diplomatic activities, in particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Among these documents is a video showing civilians, including two Reuters journalists, killed by fire from an American combat helicopter in Iraq in July 2007. He theoretically faced up to 175 years in prison under the Espionage Act.
In the latest twist in this long-running affair which has become a symbol for its supporters of the threats to press freedom, two British judges in May granted Julian Assange the right to appeal against his extradition.
That appeal was to include whether he would benefit from free speech protection as an alien in the U.S. legal system.
The founder of WikiLeaks was arrested by British police in April 2019 after seven years spent in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, in order to avoid extradition to Sweden in a rape investigation, dismissed the same year.
Since then, calls have increased for US President Joe Biden to drop the charges against him. Australia made an official request to this effect in February, which Joe Biden said he was examining, raising hope among his supporters.
