Yes, Julian Assange opened the eyes of millions around the world by the atrocities of an armed conflict. But the world went after him, keeping him imprisoned for many years.
He had to negotiate to be free.
It was, as his friends described it, the “last kick of the British establishment”. At 2am on Monday, Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, was woken up in his small cell in the high-security Belmarsh prison, south-east London, and ordered to dress before being put in handcuffs.
It was the beginning of the end of Assange’s incarceration in Britain but it was going to be on his jailers’ terms.
“He was brought into a transport vehicle and put in a tiny box there, where he basically sat for three hours,” said
Kristinn Hrafnsson, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, of his friend’s delivery to Stansted airport in Essex, 40 miles (65km) north-east of the capital.
“There were up to 40 policemen guarding the outside,” Hrafnsson said. “There was a helicopter hovering overhead, six police vehicles in a convoy to the airport, when they knew they were driving him basically out of the country in accordance with the agreement that has been drawn up.
“It begs the question: why on earth? What on earth did they envision? That he will abscond on his way to freedom?”
After seven years hiding away in a small room of the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge, central London, and a further five in Belmarsh, Assange, now 52, is expected to walk out of a hearing at a US district court on the Pacific island of Saipan , in the Northern Mariana Islands, as a free man.
He will be pleaded guilty to a single criminal charge of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defense documents, at which point US prosecutors will play their part in the plea deal by seeking a 62-month sentence. This will take into account the time Assange has spent in jail, allowing him to immediately return to his native Australia.
The final moments of the Assange saga had been tightly choreographed. A social media-friendly video of Assange’s release into the hands of his British lawyer, Gareth Pierce, at Stansted was released by WikiLeaks along with a crowdfunding appeal to cover the $520,000 cost of the Bombardier Global 6000 jet that took him to Saipan. He had not been permitted to fly commercially.
Right until the end, there was jeopardy for a man once named an “enemy of the US state” for his role in the publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents relating to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
His wife, Stella, said: “We were n’t really sure until the last 24 hours that it was actually happening.”
The genesis of Assange’s release had been in a plea deal proposed by his lawyers to the US justice department in March.
The US had been pursuing Assange for extradition on 18 charges, exposing him to up to 175 years in prison. Assange’s lawyers suggested their client, who had physical and mental health problems, could instead plead guilty to one count remotely from London. With time served, he could then be released.
The US justice department was not convinced. Hrafnsson, who was the last person to see Assange in his cell in Belmarsh when he visited on Saturday, said the real turning point had been a high court ruling in May.
Assange won the right to appeal against his extradition to the US, closing down the possibility of him being quickly delivered up to the US justice system. Dame Victoria Sharp, the president of the king’s bench division of the high court, and Mr Justice Johnson, ruled there was an arguable case that Assange could be discriminated against, after being told that a US prosecutor had said the first amendment might not cover foreigners in matters of national security.
“The decision… in the high court was an absolute turning point, in my opinion,” Hrafnsson said. “That, for the first time, indicated that he was on a road to victory, fighting the extradition, even though it would possibly take years, going through all stages in judiciary here and in the European court of human rights.”
Since May 2022, when Anthony Albanese led the Australian Labor party to victory in a federal election, Joe Biden’s administration had also been facing political pressure from Canberra to find a compromise that both sides could stomach.
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