LONDON: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was sentenced by a London court on Wednesday to 50 weeks in jail for skipping bail.
The 47-year-old Assange broke bail to enter the Ecuadorean embassy almost seven years ago.
He was dragged out of the embassy last month and charged by the United States for one of the biggest ever leaks of classified information.Judge Deborah Taylor said Assange had exploited his privileged position to flout the law and express his disdain for British justice.
The Australian whistleblower, who was arrested on Apr 11 after Ecuador gave him up, raised a clenched fist as he arrived in a prison van at Southwark Crown Court.
Assange fled to Ecuador’s embassy in 2012 after a British judge ordered his extradition to face Swedish allegations of sexual assault and rape, which he strongly denied.
He claimed the allegations were a pretext to transfer him to the United States, where he feared prosecution over the release by WikiLeaks of millions of classified documents.
There is no longer an active investigation in Sweden and the extradition request has lapsed.
US hearing on Thursday
Assange appeared in court within hours of his arrest, and a judge found him guilty of breaching his bail conditions.
Any sentence handed down on Wednesday is likely to take into account the past few weeks spent in jail.
The biggest concern for his lawyers is the US extradition request. An initial hearing in the case is set for this Thursday.
The US indictment charges him with “conspiracy” for working with former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to crack a password stored on Department of Defence computers in March 2010.
Manning passed hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, exposing US military wrongdoing in the Iraq war and diplomatic secrets about scores of countries around the world.
Assange could face up to five years in jail if found guilty, although his team is fighting his extradition and the process could take years.
The charge has raised serious concerns among organisations advocating free speech, including politicians such as British opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
WikiLeaks is also back in the news in the United States, over its alleged role in the leak of Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016 US presidential election.
The Swedish claims against Assange date back to 2010, when he was at the centre of a global storm over WikiLeaks’ exposures.
The sexual assault claim expired in 2015, but while the rape claim was dropped in 2017, the alleged victim wants the case reopened.
If Stockholm makes a formal extradition request, Britain must decide whether to consider it before or after that of the United States.
A group of British lawmakers have urged the Swedish case to take precedence, saying the rights of the alleged victims must not be lost in the political row. - FMT
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