Tuesday, June 25, 2024
Year : 2, Issue: 25
Stella Assange, the wife of WikiLeaks founder Julian, told Reuters on Tuesday they would seek a pardon after he agreed to plead guilty to violating U.S. espionage law, bringing his long-running legal saga in Britain to an end.
Assange, 52, will plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents and is expected to be sentenced to 62 months of time already served at a hearing in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands.
He will then be free to return home to Australia.
Stella Assange, a lawyer who has worked on his campaign almost since the start of his legal battles, said she was elated at the move but still angry that he had been held for so long.
The couple married while he was in Belmarsh maximum security jail in London, and they had two children while he was holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.
She said they would seek a pardon because the acceptance of guilt on an espionage charge was a “very serious concern” for journalists around the world. She also said they would launch a fundraising campaign as the flight from London to Saipan for a court hearing and then to Australia would cost around half a million US dollars.
“The fact that there is a guilty plea, under the Espionage Act in relation to obtaining and disclosing National Defence information is obviously a very serious concern for journalists and national security journalists in general,” she said.
Source: Reuters
