Dario THUBURN -
Aheroic campaigner for democratic openness, or an alleged criminal trying to avoid justice: after a decade in the limelight, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange remains a highly polarising figure.
The 47-year-old Australian, who now faces the reopening of a 2010 abuse investigation against him in Sweden, is already in prison in Britain for breach of bail conditions.
He was arrested by British police at Ecuador’s embassy in London, where he had been holed up since 2012, after the Ecuadorian government withdrew his asylum.
Assange has always denied the Swedish allegations, saying they were politically motivated and expressing fears of a plot to transfer him to the United States to be tried there. The US has now submitted a formal request for his extradition on a charge of computer hacking.
At the time the Swedish assault claims were first made 2010, Assange was the frontman of whistleblowing website WikiLeaks as it exposed government secrets worldwide, with particular focus on the US.
Transparency and anti-war campaigners hailed his work revealing the deaths of civilians, torture and clandestine military operations with the release of 500,000 US documents on the Iraq and Afghan wars.
But the United States and its allies accused him of risking lives by sharing information on sources, intelligence techniques and key infrastructure sites. Following his arrest, WikiLeaks said that “powerful actors, including the CIA, are engaged in a sophisticated effort to dehumanise, delegitimize and imprison him”.
Assange was initially supported by human rights groups and newspapers that once worked with him to edit and publish the war logs. But many were also horrified when WikiLeaks dumped the documents unredacted online, including the names of informants.
When in 2016 a UN panel declared that Assange had been detained arbitrarily, one of his previous media partners, The Guardian, dismissed the idea and said he should face justice.
There have since been questions about his relationship with Russia, with WikiLeaks identified in independent prosecutor Robert Mueller’s probe into interference in the 2016 US election.
Mueller found that Russian government actors hacked White House hopeful Hillary Clinton’s campaign “and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks”.
Born in Townsville, Queensland, in 1971, Assange has described a nomadic childhood and claims to have attended 37 schools before settling in Melbourne. As a teenager, he discovered a talent for computer hacking, and although he has pleaded guilty to 25 such offences, he has only ever walked away with fines. — AFP
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