JUntil the end, Julian Assange’s tortuous legal journey, lasting fourteen years, will have been special. The founder of WikiLeaks finally walked free, Wednesday June 26, at the age of 52, from an improbable federal court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, a Pacific territory administered by the United States where he had arrived during the night by private plane after being taken from his prison in London. Saipan especially presented the advantage for him of not having to set foot on the American continent, which he wanted to avoid above all else. He will never return there, since his conviction provides for ban from the United States.
Accompanied by former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, current ambassador to Washington, Julian Assange pleaded guilty to the crime of’“obtaining and disclosing information on national defense”, at the end of the amicable agreement negotiated with the American Department of Justice. He admitted to having encouraged his « source »ex-military Chelsea Manning, to provide him “classified material”in this case documents from the State Department and the Pentagon classified « secret », which WikiLeaks made public between 2009 and 2011. The five-year prison sentence handed down allowed him to definitively regain his freedom since it corresponds to the time spent in prison in the United Kingdom. Australian national, Julian Assange then took the plane to reunite with his family in Sydney.
Important revelations
This late outcome, obtained thanks to the lobbying of the current Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, with President Joe Biden, is obviously fortunate for a man who will have spent twelve years in captivity, under the threat of extradition request from American justice : the eighteen counts brought against him exposed him to a sentence of 175 years in prison. First a refugee for seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, he was then arrested by the British police in 2019 and imprisoned since.
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Martyr of freedom of expression for some, troubled character for others, Julian Assange has continued to fuel controversy, notably for having published emails from the Democratic Party and its candidate Hillary Clinton, Donald’s opponent. Trump in 2016, and for collaborating on Russian television RT. The world was part, in 2010, of the group of five newspapers, including the New York Times and the Guardian, which published a selection of diplomatic cables from the State Department from a set of some 250,000 documents provided by WikiLeaks. This publication, carefully edited to avoid endangering those involved, made it possible to reveal and illuminate important aspects of American foreign policy. The classification level of these documents, « secret » and no « top secret »was not the highest.
Julian Assange’s guilty plea agreement does not end this controversy, since he is convicted under the federal Espionage Act. While it allows the American authorities to justify their relentlessness, it nevertheless contradicts the spirit of the First Amendment to the Constitution on freedom of expression. Revealing war crimes, as allowed by the distribution by WikiLeaks in 2007 of a Pentagon video on shootings deliberately targeting civilians, including journalists, killed in Iraq, is not espionage but law. to information.
