President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) celebrated, this Tuesday morning (25), the agreement signed between the founder of the Wikileaks website, Julian Assange, and the United States in the action that investigated the leak of confidential government information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other topics.
The agreement was signed on Monday (24) and will allow Assange to return to Australia, where he has nationality. He had been held in a London prison since 2019 after spending seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in the English capital.
In the meantime, Lula became one of Assange’s main defenders, constantly calling for his release and criticizing the lack of activism in the press, which would have benefited from the data he leaked about the American government.
“The world is a little better and less unfair today. Julian Assange is free after 1,901 days in prison. His release and return home, even if late, represent a democratic victory and the fight for press freedom”, said Lula on a social network (look here). The Brazilian government has not yet officially commented.
In mid-May, on the eve of the extradition trial to the United States, Lula said that Assange was suffering “persecution” from the press who, for him, “should be defending his freedom”.
“Julian Assange, the journalist who should have won the Pulitzer Prize for revealing secrets of the powerful, has instead been imprisoned for 5 years in England, condemned to the silence of the entire press that should be defending his freedom as part of the fight for freedom of expression,” he said.
At the end of 2022, Lula met the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks – the website created by Assange to release secret documents –, Kristinn Hrafnsson, to defend the activist and criticize the arrest. “I asked them to send my solidarity. May Assange be released from his unjust prison,” he said at the time.
Assange was facing a sentence of up to 175 years in prison in the United States for releasing more than 700,000 confidential documents about American military and diplomatic activities, including a 2007 video showing civilians being killed by gunfire from an American helicopter in Iraq.
Across the ocean, the United States claims that Assange and WikiLeaks put lives at risk by publishing documents that revealed the names of intelligence sources.
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