Julian Assange, the famous whistleblower and founder of the WikiLeaks organization, has never been closer to freedom. Locked up in the United Kingdom for ten years, he left the country, heading for the Mariana Islands, an American territory in the Pacific Ocean. Pursued by the United States for having made public hundreds of thousands of confidential American documents, he will appear this Wednesday at 1 a.m. Paris time in court where he is expected to plead guilty.
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Julian Assange was pursued by the UNITED STATES for 18 charges, but an agreement was finally reached, and he will only appear before American justice for one, that of “ conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information. »
If the judge validates the guilty plea agreement, the whistleblower will be sentenced to five years in prison. A sentence that he has already served,United Kingdomwhere he had been locked up for five years in a high-security prison.
End of an Australian-American-British saga
Born inAustralia, Julian Assange took refuge for several years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He was finally arrested by the British police and remanded in custody. For five years, he lived in fear of being extradited to the United States, where he faced up to 175 years in prison for having made public confidential American documents, on their military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan in particular.
But it was without counting on the support of his native country, including the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last February called on the United States to put an end to this affair. A call heard by Joe Biden: “ We examine it », He responded to the Australian Prime Minister, arousing a surge of hope among Julian Assange’s supporters. This release would therefore be the result of a discreet diplomatic ballet in recent months between the three countries.
Read alsoWikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released after agreement with US justice
Return to Australia
After this legal epic lasting almost 14 years, and if everything goes as planned, Julian Assange could return directly home to Australia, where his wife, Stella, and their two children aged 5 and 7 are waiting for him.
He must travel on a specially chartered plane, not being authorized to take a commercial flight, wrote Stella Assange on the social network private flight. A lawyer by profession, Stella Assange also intends to request a presidential pardon: if her husband had to admit his guilt to be free, the espionage accusations remain, according to her, a very serious concern for press freedom.
Once he returns home, will Julian Assange re-engage with his WikiLeaks organization or close the journalism page for good? The priority for now, according to his wife, is for him to regain his health after these five years of confinement.
What is pleading guilty?
It is an agreement between the prosecutor and the lawyer which results in a less severe sentence, explains Antoine Gallenne of RFI’s international service. The objective of Julian Assange’s team was clear: to avoid at all costs being handed over to American justice where he faced a sentence of 175 years of imprisonment, under the Espionage Act.
So to escape it, the whistleblower agreed to recognize his participation in a “ conspiracy to obtain and disclose information relating to national defense “. Or only one charge, according to the court documents made public, instead of the eighteen to which he was subject.
Calls have been growing for the President of the United States to drop the charges against the founder of WikiLeaks. Australia presented an official request to this effect in February which Joe Biden said he was examining. Which had raised the hopes of Julian Assange’s supporters.