Judicial triumph of Julian Assange, the man who made the US tremble

Julian Assange, who has been detained in the United Kingdom for five years and who was granted this Monday by the British justice system the possibility of appealing his extradition to the United States, became a nightmare for this country.

The US government accuses the 52-year-old Australian of espionage after the massive leak of classified material on his Wikileaks page.

The British justice, which had granted the extradition in June 2022, allowed Assange to appeal this Monday, after it was not convinced by guarantees from the United States on whether it could invoke the constitutional amendments related to freedom of expression.

In 2006, Assange created a non-profit media outlet called Wikileaks, which published, according to the site itself, more than ten million classified documents, provided by anonymous sources.

The United States suddenly found itself with a medium that revealed secret documents leaked from the Pentagon about its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as confidential correspondence from the government and its embassies around the world.

Accusations in Sweden

In 2010 he was designated by Time magazine readers as character of the year and Newsweek defined him in 2012 as one of the most revolutionary characters.

Precisely in 2010, when Wikileaks reached its peak of popularity with those leaks, Sweden demanded the arrest of Assange on two charges, one for the rape of a woman and the other for sexual harassment, during a visit to Stockholm to give a conference.

These charges would be dropped over time.

Assange denied the veracity of both accusations, but had to undergo house arrest in his rural English home, until in May 2012 the High Court in London agreed to his extradition to Sweden.

Shortly after, in June 2012, faced with the harassment to which he was being subjected and to avoid his extradition, Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he stayed for seven years, during the government of Rafael Correa.

With the arrival of Lenín Moreno to power in Ecuador, the country stopped granting asylum to the Australian, and Assange was arrested in April 2019 by the British police and imprisoned in Belmarsh Prison.

His wife Stella Moris revealed in 2020 that she had two children with Assange while he lived in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and she was part of the legal team working for him.

difficult childhood

The founder of WikiLeaks was born in Townsville, in northeastern Australia, without meeting his father, John Shipton, until he was 25, as his mother separated from him before Julian’s birth.

His mother had a new relationship, for eight years, with Brett Assange, from whom the WikiLeaks founder inherited his last name.

In that first part of his childhood, Julian Assange led a wandering life, since his mother and stepfather founded a theater company and lived traveling.

After that separation, his mother married and had another child with a musician, Leif Meynell, who was a member of a sect, in which Assange lived.

But Meynell mistreated Assange and his mother, so they ended up fleeing.

Attracted by self-taught computing, between 2003 and 2006 he studied Physics and Mathematics, as well as Philosophy, at the University of Melbourne, without finishing any degree.

That would not prevent him from creating an Internet page, like Wikileaks, which was a headache for the largest world power.