The wife of the founder of Wikileaks, Stella Assange, spoke this Wednesday on behalf of her husband, shortly after Julian Assange landed minutes before eight in the afternoon in his native Australia (noon in mainland Spain), already as a free man after spending 12 years in prison in the United Kingdom. At a press conference in Canberra, the capital of Australia, the Swedish lawyer who accompanied Assange, first as a lawyer and then as a spouse, during her captivity, stated that her husband “will continue to maintain her principles without fear.” . She then asked for “space, time and privacy” before her partner recovers and can address the media himself. Julian Assange, he has said, “should not have spent a single day in prison.” However, his case, she has lamented, now leaves freedom of information “in an unsafe place” and sets a “precedent that will now be used in the future against the rest of the press.”
Surrounded by her husband’s legal advisers, Stella Assange was alluding to the US refusal to drop espionage charges against the Wikileaks founder, which forced him to enter into a plea deal with the US Department of Justice to regain his freedom. In exchange for his release, Assange pleaded guilty to a violation of the Espionage Act.
One of Assange’s main legal advisors, Australian lawyer Jennifer Robinson, has also criticized the “precedent” of Assange’s agreement, which she described as “dangerous” for the “rest of the media.” “Unfortunately, the terms of the plea agreement are that he, in order to gain his freedom, had to elect to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage for publishing evidence of American war crimes and human rights abuses,” Robinson said. .
After being released on Tuesday in the United Kingdom and hours before returning to Australia on a private jet, he had appeared before a court in the Northern Mariana Islands, which is a free associated state of the United States, like Puerto Rico. There, a judge ratified the agreement he had reached with the US Attorney’s Office: to plead guilty to espionage in exchange for his sentence being considered fulfilled for the five years he spent in a maximum security prison in London. Previously, he had spent seven years as a refugee in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
“I hope the media realizes the danger of this American case against Julian, which criminalizes him, which has secured his conviction for gathering news and publishing information that was true, that the public deserved to know,” Stella Assange warned.
Before the agreement, the Justice Department accused Assange of 17 crimes against the Espionage Act and one for computer interference. The Australian editor faced a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison, mainly for the leak of more than 250,000 classified documents from the US State Department in November 2010, which left Washington’s foreign policy in a bad light and even pointed to the possible commission of war crimes by US troops in conflicts such as Iraq. Morning Express was one of the media that participated in the concerted effort to publish these papers.
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After having admitted this charge of violation of the Espionage Act, the only way for Assange to be exonerated from the crime he has admitted to regain freedom would be a presidential pardon from Joe Biden in the United States. During her appearance, the editor’s wife expressed her hope that this possibility would become a reality. The lawyer then urged the press to act in that sense: “I think he will be forgiven if the press unites to reverse this precedent.”
Both Stella Assange and lawyer Robinson have thanked Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and “millions of people” who “worked quietly and protested in the streets for years” for her husband’s release. “We did it,” said Stella Assange. Robinson later explained that Assange told Prime Minister Albanese as soon as he returned to her native country: “You have saved my life.”
Official caution
As soon as he landed in Canberra, the administrative capital of Australia, the head of the Australian Government had called the founder of Wikileaks. “Our Government does things and has achieved this result,” Albanese later celebrated. The prime minister later met Assange at the Australian Air Force base where his plane landed in Canberra. “Diplomacy must be patient and must be built on trust,” said the president.
The Australian Government had in recent months intensified its diplomatic activity with the United States to achieve the release of Assange. In his two years in power, Albanese has openly advocated for her release. After confirming that the editor had regained freedom in the United Kingdom, the Australian Executive welcomed the news with caution, which has guided its efforts with its American ally to achieve the release of the founder of the leak website.
The Australian prime minister has never publicly refuted the US accusation that Assange had violated the Espionage Act by disclosing secret US diplomatic cables. Albanese has also carefully avoided defining Assange as a “journalist”, as he describes himself. The Australian prime minister has, however, reiterated over the years that this case “has been going on for a long time” and that his government “will defend all Australian citizens”.
“There was nothing to be gained from his continued imprisonment. We wanted him back home. And tonight it happened. We made it happen,” the Labour politician said on Wednesday.
As a representative of a center-left government that approached the United States in its battle against China’s expansion in the Pacific Ocean, Australians began to see in the Assange case a scale to measure the strength that Albanese could have against President Biden. The context played in its favor: months before coming to power, in mid-2022, Australia had signed a strategic defense pact with Washington, which created an agenda of meetings in which Assange’s release began to creep into the issues. that the two leaders would address.
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