Labor MP Julian Hill, a leading advocate of Assange, said: “Whatever you think of Assange, he is Australian and enough is enough. The Prime Minister deserves enormous personal credit for his judgment and determination, never giving up in pursuing resolution of this case.”
Independent MP Andrew Wilkie, one of Assange’s biggest champions in parliament, said at the time: “Personally, I’d be thrilled with a breakthrough because this injustice has been wrong from the start and must be brought to an end.”
US ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy flagged a possible plea deal in an interview with this masthead last year, saying “there absolutely could be a resolution” to the Assange case.
The trove of more than 700,000 documents included diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts such as a 2007 video of a US Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people including two Reuters news staff. That video was released in 2010.
The hearing is taking place in the Mariana Islands because of Assange’s opposition to travelling to the continental US and the court’s proximity to Australia.
The charges against Assange sparked outrage among his many global supporters who have long argued that Assange as the publisher of Wikileaks should not face charges typically used against federal government employees who steal or leak information.
Many press freedom advocates have argued that criminally charging Assange represents a threat to free speech.
Assange was first arrested in Britain in 2010 on a European arrest warrant after Swedish authorities said they wanted to question him over sex-crime allegations that were later dropped.
He fled to Ecuador’s embassy, where he remained for seven years, to avoid extradition to Sweden.
He was dragged out of the embassy in 2019 and jailed for skipping bail. He has been in London’s Belmarsh top security jail ever since, from where he has for almost five years been fighting extradition to the United States.
While in Belmarsh he married his partner Stella with whom he had two children while he was holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy.
with Reuters, AP
More to come
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