The founder of the WikiLeaks site, after spending five years in prison, was finally released after reaching an agreement with the US Justice Department.
Julian Assangefounder of the site WikiLeakspleaded guilty to disclosing confidential documents in a US court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, as part of a deal that will see him released after 13 years of a lengthy legal drama.
In this way, the Australian will be released after spending five years in prison and in the next few hours he will travel to Canberra.
“I see this and think about what overloaded your senses must bewalking through the press after years of sensory depravity and the four walls of his high-security Belmarsh prison cell“, said Stella Assangethe wife of the founder of WikiLeaks, on the social media platform X.
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Photo: Reuters
How the agreement was reached for the release of Julian Assange
The momentum in favor of an agreement accelerated earlier this year. In February, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese sounded impatient, warning the United States that “this case cannot drag on indefinitely.” And the Australian Parliament passed a motion demanding an end to the persecution against the founder of WikiLeaks.
British prosecutors said Tuesday that they were “first informed in March of the possibility that Assange will agree to plead guilty to resolve the issue of your extradition” of the United Kingdom, claimed by the United States.
The United States ambassador to Australia, Caroline Kennedy“talked about it in recent months” and emphasized that “there was a way to solve this,” he told the AFP agency Jared Mondscheinresearch director of the Center for American Studies at the University of Sydney.
What does the agreement for the release of Julian Assange consist of?
As of this agreement, Julian Assange will avoid serving the initial sentence of 175 years in prison, but will be sentenced to 62 months in prison, which he already served in preventive detention in London, for “conspiracy to obtain and disclose information relating to national defense”the only charge to which he pleaded guilty.
“The logic of the agreement is that Assange will have served five years in prison for activities that journalists carry out every day, and that we absolutely need them to do“, estimates Jameel Jaffer, who considers it “a terrible precedent”.
Source: Ambito
