Tuesday, June 25, 2024, 02:07
The founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, has reached an agreement with the United States Department of Justice to plead guilty to disseminating secret documents in exchange for a sentence of 62 months in prison. This figure is precisely equivalent to the time that he has already spent preventively imprisoned in the United Kingdom, so in practice the journalist and activist of Australian origin would be free.
This agreement has been revealed in a court document filed on Monday before the United States District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, as published by the American television network NBC News. However, it still needs to be approved by a judge, although he is expected to make a decision this Wednesday. If the pact is finally approved, Assange would be released without having to go through US custody.
Assange was arrested by British authorities on April 11, 2019. It was after leaving the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he remained a refugee for almost seven years. Since then he has been held in a maximum security prison, by virtue of an arrest warrant issued from the United States, Europa Press reports.
First judicial victory
At the end of May, the High Court in London ruled in favor of the Wikileaks founder to allow him to appeal against his extradition order to the North American country. If he had been handed over to the US federal government, it was feared that he would face a battery of charges that could involve up to 175 years in prison for the dissemination of thousands of documents classified as secret, many of them of military origin.
However, in his defense the journalist has defended at all times that the information revealed through his platform throughout 2010 served to publicize war crimes that the United States would have committed in other countries.
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