We were still waiting for the umpteenth British court hearing in the middle of summer to prevent Julian Assange's extradition to the US. But to everyone's surprise, the Australian whistleblower reached an agreement with the US justice system and is expected to plead guilty on Wednesday, June 26, according to court documents released on Tuesday.
The 52-year-old Australian is expected to plead guilty in a US court in the Marianas Islands, on the US Pacific island of Saipan, for disseminating confidential US documents. The WikiLeaks founder should then be sentenced to 62 months' imprisonment, which he has already served, and then, according to court documents, return to Australia, which he has not been to for over 12 years.
According to WikiLeaks, the whistleblower has already left his British detention center in Belmarsh, London, and boarded the plane that will take him to the Saipan court. His plane was due to stop over in Bangkok in the morning, according to Agence France-Presse. A video, posted on social media by his wife Stella Assange, shows the Australian boarding a plane at London's Stansted Airport. Assange's French lawyer, Antoine Vey, told Le Monde he was "delighted" to "see Assange walking down the street; behind him there is a fight for freedom of information that will always continue."
Embarrassing leaks
The agreement could mean the end of the long battle between the US authorities and Assange, launched after the WikiLeaks website released thousands of confidential US diplomatic cables, as well as classified documents revealing, among other things, the heavy toll of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These documents were published in partnership with numerous international media, including Le Monde.
A refugee for seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, which had offered him diplomatic asylum, Assange lived as a recluse in the building's corridors before being expelled in 2019. He was then arrested by the British authorities, in connection with rape proceedings in Sweden.
Since then, he has been doing everything in his power to avoid prosecution under the US Espionage Act, a tough new law targeting the dissemination of confidential documents. Assange is accused of having solicited and then disseminated non-anonymized classified documents, going far beyond journalistic work. The publication of the WikiLeaks cables, highly embarrassing for US diplomacy, generated a strong response from the administration. Assange's informant, ex-military officer Chelsea Manning, was sentenced in 2013 to 35 years in prison, then released on the decision of President Barack Obama in 2017, after a very difficult detention.
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