WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Heads to Australia after U.S. Guilty Plea
Editor
26 June 2024 18:36 WIB
LONG SAGA
Assange had agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count, according to filings in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
The U.S. territory in the western Pacific was chosen due to his opposition to traveling to the mainland U.S. and for its proximity to Australia, prosecutors said.
Dozens of media from around the world attended the hearing, with more gathered outside the courtroom to cover the proceedings. Media were not allowed inside the courtroom to film the hearing.
"I watch this and think how overloaded his senses must be, walking through the press scrum after years of sensory deprivation and the four walls of his high-security Belmarsh prison cell," Stella Assange, the wife of WikiLeaks founder said on the social media platform X.
Politicians in Australia who had campaigned for his release raised concern about the guilty plea on U.S. soil, saying he was a journalist who had been convicted for doing his job.
"That is a really alarming precedent. It is the sort of thing we'd expect in an authoritarian or totalitarian country," said Andrew Wilkie, an independent lawmaker who led a parliamentary group advocating for Assange.
Assange spent more than five years in what Judge Manglona called one of Britain's harshest prisons and seven years holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London as he fought extradition.
While stuck at the embassy he had two sons with his partner, Stella, who had been one of his lawyers. They married in 2022 at the Belmarsh prison in London.
The Australian government pushed hard for his release and raised the issue with the United States several times.
"This isn't something that has happened in the last 24 hours," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told a news conference on Wednesday.
"This is something that has been considered, patient, worked through in a calibrated way, which is how Australia conducts ourselves."
REUTERS
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