Julian Assange started his WikiLeaks whistleblowing website on a quest for \u201cradical transparency and truth,\u201d a mission that turned an already polarizing personality into a notorious character and earned him crusaders and critics in equal measure. <\/p>\n
The long-running battle for his extradition to the United States continued this month, with US lawyers providing the UK High Court with a series of assurances around the 52-year-old WikiLeaks founder\u2019s First Amendment rights and that he would not receive the death penalty if he were handed over. Those are set to be reviewed at a fresh hearing on May 20. <\/p>\n
It has been 12 years since the embattled Australian has been able to walk freely. He\u2019s spent the past five years in London\u2019s high-security Belmarsh prison and nearly seven years before that holed up at the Ecuadorian embassy in the English capital, trying to avoid arrest. <\/p>\n
He faces life imprisonment in the US for publishing hundreds of thousands of sensitive military and government documents supplied by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning more than a dozen years ago. <\/strong>But recently there has been increased pressure for Assange\u2019s case to be dismissed. <\/p>\n Just this month, President Joe Biden offered Assange\u2019s supporters a glimmer of hope saying his administration was \u201cconsidering\u201d a request from Australia to drop its charges against the WikiLeaks founder. The remarks were described as an \u201cencouraging\u201d signal by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who added that Assange had \u201calready paid a significant price\u201d and \u201cenough is enough.\u201d <\/p>\n Born in Townsville, eastern Queensland, in 1971, Assange had a less than conventional upbringing. His education was a combination of home schooling and correspondence courses, since his family moved frequently. <\/p>\n In his teens, he discovered a natural proficiency for computing, but his activities \u2013 which included accessing several secure systems, including the Pentagon and NASA, under the hacker alias \u201cMendax\u201d \u2013 soon put him on the radar of authorities. In 1991, he was charged with 31 counts of cybercrime by Australian authorities but only received a small fine at sentencing after pleading guilty to most of the charges. <\/p>\n Following his brush with the law, Assange worked as a computer security consultant, traveled and briefly studied physics at the University of Melbourne before withdrawing from the course. <\/p>\n His vision when starting WikiLeaks in 2006 was that it would be a kind of online repository, which would publish anonymously submitted documents, video and other sensitive materials after vetting them. <\/p>\n It ran for several years, uploading material ranging from the US military\u2019s operating manual for its detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to internal documents from the Church of Scientology and some of 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin\u2019s stolen emails. <\/p>\n On first impressions, Assange was \u201cvague\u201d and \u201celusive,\u201d Shubert recalled. With the benefit of hindsight, she now believes <\/strong>his behavior was the result of \u201csitting on this cache of documents from Chelsea Manning and trying to figure out how to publish it.\u201d <\/p>\n WikiLeaks ultimately released the video from the US helicopter attack in Iraq, sparking condemnation from human rights activists and earning rebuke from US defense officials. By the year\u2019s end, the organization had gone on to publish nearly half a million classified documents relating to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. <\/p>\n As WikiLeaks continued its disclosures, Assange found himself the latest cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre \u2013 his every movement intensely scrutinized. And with each headline, his infamy grew among those who did not share his vision. <\/p>\n Fidel Narvaez, former consul of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, met Assange in 2011, after WikiLeaks released another huge archive \u2013 this time of secret US diplomatic cables. The pair became close friends through the years. <\/p>\n Assange\u2019s story, as the \u201cteen hacker who became insurgent in information war\u201d as the Guardian put it in 2011, sounded like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster. Soon his tale was immortalized in documentaries and films, perhaps most notably in 2013\u2019s \u201cThe Fifth Estate,\u201d which Assange labeled a \u201cgeriatric snoozefest\u201d that used what he considered flawed source material. <\/p>\n For journalist and author James Ball, who briefly worked at WikiLeaks and was based for a time at Ellingham Hall, a remote manor house north of London where Assange holed up before seeking refuge in Ecuador\u2019s embassy, the infancy of WikiLeaks was an \u201cexhilarating\u201d time. <\/p>\n WikiLeaks became a household name <\/strong>thanks to its frequent data dumps, but some were starting to question the founder\u2019s behavior. For many, his polarizing personality became an issue. <\/p>\n Ball added: \u201cHe sort of liked the attention. \u2026 He <\/strong>liked the fuss that (the disclosures) caused but he was oddly incurious actually about the documents.\u201d <\/p>\n Others offer alternative explanations for Assange\u2019s eccentricities. <\/strong>Narvaez said the Assange he knew was \u201chyperactive and workaholic\u201d and pointed to his diagnosed autism spectrum disorder as an element of his personality. <\/p>\n Such questions aside, WikiLeaks essentially ground to a halt when Assange was accused of sexual assault in Sweden in August 2010. The organization\u2019s focus shifted from offense to defense, despite the transparency campaigner\u2019s vehement denial of the allegations against him. There were mounting calls for Assange to leave WikiLeaks and, when he didn\u2019t, many cut ties with it. <\/p>\n Assange labeled it \u201ca smear campaign\u201d orchestrated to pave the way for his further extradition to the US and refused to go to Sweden for questioning. <\/p>\n In June 2012, while out on bail from UK officials over the Swedish probe, he opted for a nuclear option and knocked on the door at 3 Hans Crescent, where he requested political asylum from Ecuador. <\/p>\n Outside the confines of his diplomatic shelter, the world questioned whether Assange was trying to circumvent justice. <\/p>\n Over time, his relationship with his host soured along with the arrival of a new president in Ecuador in 2017. Assange was \u201can inherited problem\u201d for Lenin Moreno, who was facing pressure from the US to expel him from the diplomatic bolthole. <\/p>\n \u201cIt was obvious that former President Moreno was going to give in to external and internal pressure,\u201d Narvaez said. <\/p>\n Narvaez, seen as too close to the unwanted houseguest, was asked to leave in July 2018 amid a shake-up of the diplomatic mission\u2019s staff. \u201cI left him isolated, and I was the last person he trusted,\u201d Narvaez said. <\/p>\n Nine months later, in April 2019, Assange was pulled kicking and screaming from the building by London\u2019s Metropolitan Police on an extradition warrant from the US Justice Department. <\/p>\n Assange has since lived, mostly isolated, in a three-by-two-meter cell at Belmarsh prison in southeast London. The prison has the capacity to hold over 900 inmates and is known for once housing infamous terror suspects such as Abu Hamza al-Masri within its high-security unit. <\/p>\n The US has accused Assange of endangering lives by publishing secret military documents in 2010 and 2011. He is wanted on 18 criminal charges relating to his organization\u2019s dissemination of classified material and diplomatic cables. If convicted, he could face up to 175 years in prison conditions much harsher than here in the UK. <\/p>\n Fighting his corner since he entered Belmarsh: his wife, Stella Assange. The couple married in March 2022, while he was in prison. <\/p>\n Stella, the mother of Assange\u2019s two young sons, called her husband a \u201cpolitical prisoner\u201d outside court last month and has repeatedly voiced her fear that, if extradited, he could take his own life. <\/p>\n She labeled the US\u2019 latest guarantees that Assange could lean on First Amendment protections at trial \u201cblatant weasel words\u201d in a statement on April 16. <\/p>\n \u201cThe diplomatic note does nothing to relieve our family\u2019s extreme distress about his future \u2013 his grim expectation of spending the rest of his life in isolation in US prison for publishing award-winning journalism,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n Assange\u2019s team argue he is being extradited for political reasons and that a handover to the US violates the European Convention on Human Rights. It\u2019s a claim supported by independent experts. <\/p>\n The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, in February called on the British government to halt a possible extradition and reiterated her concerns about Assange\u2019s fitness and \u201cthe potential for him to receive a wholly disproportionate sentence in the United States.\u201d <\/p>\n Marking Assange\u2019s five years at Belmarsh, Amnesty International\u2019s Secretary General Agn\u00e8s Callamard warned that Assange, if extradited, would \u201cbe at risk of serious abuse, including prolonged solitary confinement, which would violate the prohibition on torture or other ill-treatment.\u201d \ufeff<\/strong>She added that US assurances over his treatment could not be relied upon as they are \u201criddled with loopholes.\u201d <\/p>\n Beyond the personal costs for Assange, many have expressed concern about the broader implications for press freedom around the world if he is sent to the US. <\/p>\n Five international media organizations that collaborated <\/strong>with Assange have called the US government to end its prosecution of him for publishing classified material. In a 2022 letter, representatives for The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pa\u00eds and Der Spiegel argued publishing is not a crime. <\/p>\n \u201cObtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists. If that work is criminalised, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker,\u201d the letter stated. <\/p>\n Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said anyone who cares about press freedoms should not be comforted by the First Amendment assurances offered by US lawyers. <\/p>\n He continued, \u201cAnd if the government is successful, no journalist will ever again be able to publish US government secrets without risking (their) liberty.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Julian Assange started his WikiLeaks whistleblowing website on a quest for \u201cradical transparency and truth,\u201d a mission that turned an already polarizing personality into a notorious character and earned him crusaders and critics in equal measure. The long-running battle for his extradition to the United States continued this month, with US lawyers providing the UK High Court with a series of assurances around the 52-year-old WikiLeaks <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2380,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2379","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} The ascent of Assange<\/h2>\n
Under a global spotlight<\/h2>\n
Shifting attitudes<\/h2>\n
Legal limbo<\/h2>\n
Far-reaching repercussions<\/h2>\n