CANBERRA, Australia — Australians waited for Julian Assange’s chartered plane to arrive on home soil with a mixture of joy and relief on Wednesday
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange pleaded guilty June 26 to one count of violating the Espionage Act in a U.S. federal court in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands. Assange maintained in court Wednesday that he was a journalist and that he thought what he was doing, in publishing an avalanche of classified U.S. government information, was protected by the First Amendment, contending that the right to free speech contradicted the Espionage Act.Andrew Wilkie, an independent member of Parliament, warned it was “a really alarming precedent” for a journalist to be prosecuted in this way.
“In Australia, it’s not just about whether he’s a journalist who’s been wrongfully imprisoned,” he said. “It’s also about this weird unresolved issue of this unhealthy relationship between Australia and the United States.”The longer Assange has languished in prison, the more his case has stirred those anxieties, he added.
In some ways, Australia could prove a challenging place for the transparency activist. It is arguably the most secretive liberal democracy in the world, said Johan Lidberg, head of journalism at Monash University in Melbourne, and Australia has been criticized recently for its treatment of both whistleblowers and journalists.in 2019 — under the previous conservative government — over an Afghan war crimes investigation and amid high-profile defamation suits against journalists.
Australia, which likes to think of itself as the land of the “fair go,” was largely fed up with Assange’s ongoing ordeal, he said.
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