SYDNEY, June 26. /TASS/. The Saipan court's ruling that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is guilty of a felony for publishing US military secrets confirms Washington's criminalization of the work of reporters, his wife Stella Assange said at a press conference in Canberra.
"That precedent now can and will be used in the future against the rest of the press," she said, referring to the US case against Assange. "That would have been the only good outcome for the press in general if the US government had abandoned this case entirely," she pointed out. However, now, the entire press is in "as vulnerable a position as Julian has been," Stella Assange said. According to her, the media should "seek for this current state of affairs to change through reform of the Espionage Act," strengthening journalist protection measures and calling to pardon Assange.
WikiLeaks founder and Australian citizen Julian Assange has been held since 2019 at the high-security Belmarsh prison in the UK, where he was placed after being removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in the British capital. For more than five years, Washington has been pushing London to extradite him to the United States, but Assange’s defense has made every new attempt to prevent that from happening. Assange has been charged in the United States with crimes related to the largest disclosure of classified information in American history.
On Wednesday, as part of a deal with US prosecutors, Assange pleaded guilty in court to conspiracy to obtain and disseminate classified information. For that offense, the Australian was sentenced to the time he already served in a British prison. On the same day, Assange returned to Australia.