LettersWhy Julian Assange suffered for so many years in the free world

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange leaves a US
courthouse in Saipan, capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, on June 26, after pleading guilty to a felony charge of violating the Espionage Act under a plea deal. Photo: AFP

Published: 11:30am, 3 Jul 2024

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By publishing classified US documents, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange did humanity a favour. Through the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, he exposed evidence of possible war crimes such as the killing and torture of civilians and detainees perpetrated or condoned by the US and Nato forces.

However, then United States president Barack Obama described Assange’s leaks as “deplorable” while US senator Mitch McConnell called him a “hi-tech terrorist”. Former US House speaker Newt Gingrich declared that he should be “treated as an enemy combatant”. US federal employees were banned from accessing WikiLeaks on government computers.

Assange was arrested by the British police in 2010 in response to a warrant issued by Swedish prosecutors who suspected him of committing sexual crimes. He sought refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in the United Kingdom to avoid extradition to Sweden. The case was eventually dropped after he was dragged out of the embassy in 2019, but he was in jail for five more years while fighting extradition to the US on an Espionage Act indictment.